Send "Jimi Hendrix " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Leisureblogs |
 Jimi Hendrix combined a jazz musician’s fluidity and inventiveness on his instrument with unparalleled rock flair. That he left behind only three studio albums before he died in 1970 made him even more intriguing to subsequent generations, as if his fans were trying to figure out what might have been had he lived. For four decades, they consumed every musical leftover from his short career, no matter how poorly conceived, recorded or packaged it might’ve been. Indeed, hundreds of posthumous Hendrix recordings have been issued, most of them exploitive scraps. But “Valleys of Neptune” (Sony Legacy) is legit – not quite a lost album, but darn near close in that it compiles 12 previously unreleased studio recordings, most from a key 1969 phase in the guitarist’s career. If it doesn’t tell us anything new about Hendrix, it is a sharp snapshot of a musical genius in the studio during a period of transition. Hendrix revisited older material (“Stone Free,” “Fire,” “Red House”), covered favorite artists (Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” Elmore James’ “Bleeding Heart”) and finessed newer material (the title song, “Lullaby for the Summer”). With three exceptions, the tracks are blissfully free of the overdubs and other studio manipulations that mar many of his posthumous recordings. Instead, we get a you-are-there document of Hendrix in the last volatile days of his great power trio with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, the Experience. This combo is represented on the majority of the tracks, and its vitality still vibrates the speakers – never more so than on a definitive live-in-the-studio version of “Here My Train A Comin’,” with Hendrix bending vocal and guitar notes with shamanistic verve. He veers off into his own private galaxy as a guitarist during an instrumental version of “Sunshine of Your Love,” and conjures a new world as a lyricist on the title track. On the latter, Hendrix’s fluid rhythm-guitar work underpins images brimming with Apocalyptic foreboding: “See visions of sleeping peaks erupting/Releasing all hell that/Will shake the Earth from end to end.” Not unlike Hendrix’s music itself....full text |
| Rollingstone |
| Some grousing from fans greets most posthumous Jimi Hendrix studio releases. And fair enough: Hendrix can't offer his opinion anymore, and between past dubious product (i.e., the heavily overdubbed Crash Landing) and ongoing estate squabbles, there's been plenty of sketchy business over the years. But on Valleys of Neptune — a collection of more-or-less previously unreleased tracks recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1969, assembled by the archivists at Legacy and the Hendrix estate — the music is seething, gorgeous, alive. Unreleased doesn't necessarily mean unfamiliar. "Stone Free," the opener, remakes one of Hendrix's earliest recordings, gaining in expansive arranging what it loses in garage-band immediacy (WTF, no cowbell?!). Ditto for a raging "Fire," featuring a guitarist somehow even more fluidly dazzling than he was on the original, even if he no longer asks Rover to move over. There's a wildly jammed, slightly showoff-y instrumental of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" and a deliciously funky take on Elmore James' "Bleeding Heart." For lay Hendrix fans, however, the biggest treat will be bright, revelatory mixes of tracks known mainly to connoisseurs: The lush, tuneful space travelogue of the title track; the snarling, horny blues stomp "Ships Passing Through the Night," with its lava-spitting outro; the breakneck instrumental rocker "Lullaby for the Summer." Are these tracks "finished" as Hendrix would've intended? Probably not. But as a glimpse of the guitarist extending his reach beyond the Experience trio, it's thrilling....full text |
| Ew |
| Wouldn't it be nice if this were a brilliant collection of never-before-heard Jimi Hendrix songs recently discovered in some catacomb? Keep dreaming. On Valleys of Neptune, from ''Stone Free'' to ''Red House,'' most of these tunes are glaringly familiar. The good news: The alternate versions don't seem (too) redundant, since Hendrix was one musician whose castoffs and outtakes are worthy of obsessive scrutiny....full text |
Jimi Hendrix lyrics
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