Music: Last Songs

Six new Lennon oldies

Enough, now. The mourning, and all the indulgence that goes with it, ought to have been set aside. But patience, sympathy and sentiment—in finally impossible amounts—are what is needed for listening to Milk and Honey, twelve songs by John Lennon and Yoko Ono intended to follow up their Double Fantasy alburn, before murder intervened.

Recorded at the same time as Double Fantasy, the material on Milk and Honey reminds us that the earlier album was hardly top-form Lennon. Contented and uncertain and rambunctious by turns—and sometimes at once—Lennon's songs were...