Some grousing from fans greets most posthumous Jimi player flat releases. And fair enough: player can't offer his opinion anymore, and between time questionable product (i.e., the hard overdubbed Crash Landing) and ongoing estate squabbles, there's been plenty of uncomplete business over the years. But on Valleys of Neptune — a assemblage of more-or-less previously unreleased tracks recorded with the Jimi player Experience in 1969, assembled by the archivists at Legacy and the player estate — the music is seething, gorgeous, alive.
Unreleased doesn't necessarily mean unfamiliar. "Stone Free" the opener, remakes one of Hendrix's early recordings, gaining in expansive arranging what it loses in garage-band immediacy (WTF, no cowbell?!). Ditto for a violent"Fire" featuring a player somehow modify more fluidly dazzling than he was on the original, modify if he no longer asks Rover to move over. There's a wildly jammed, slightly showoff-y device of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" and a deliciously funky take on Elmore James' "Bleeding Heart" For lay player fans, however, the large treat will be bright, revelatory mixes of tracks known mainly to connoisseurs: The lush, tuneful space travelogue of the title track; the snarling, ruttish blues stomp "Ships Passing Through the Night" with its lava-spitting outro; the breakneck device rocker"Lullaby for the Summer" Are these tracks "finished" as player would've intended? Probably not. But as a glimpse of the player extending his reach beyond the Experience trio, it's thrilling.
