Jimi Hendrix - Valleys Of Neptune V-Album Review

Posted by Mitch Michaels on 03.17.2010

Forty years after his death, is there anything left in the Jimi Hendrix vault that we haven’t heard before?

The late 1960’s were an exciting time in rock music, possibly more so than any era since. While rock ‘n’ roll was pioneered a decade earlier, innovations in sound, studio recording and even performance (not to mention copious amounts of new drugs) made the 60’s a particularly fruitful time for people who just wanted to do something that no one had ever seen or heard before.

Perhaps that’s the reason so many of the great Rock Gods were set up in this era – an era of firsts. Jim Morrison pulled his crawling king snake out on stage. The Beatles taught us the joys of acid. Bob Dylan rebelled. And Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire.

As music tried to keep up from a business perspective, things got a little watered down. Not that nothing great came out of the 70’s or later – it was just a little harder to do something that no one had done before, and much easier to just do what had been done before again.

With all of that in mind, it makes it a little tough for even a “new” Jimi Hendrix album to give us something actually new, especially since so much material has been mined for official releases and bootlegs since Hendrix’s death in 1970. Jimi Hendrix and his Experience were legends of the 60’s, and possibly any discerning rock fan can remember where they were the first time they heard “Purple Haze”. Or “Watchtower”. Or even whole albums like Are You Experienced? and Electric Ladyland.

But with Hendrix’s untimely death at just 27, very little music (comparatively) hit airwaves in his lifetime. You had three Experience albums, the live Band Of Gypsys and the Smash Hits compilation. Along with the Woodstock performance, this was Hendrix’s recorded legacy – and a hell of a legacy it was.

What few but the most rabid Jimi Hendrix fans realize is the overwhelming wealth of material that has been released since 1970. While Jimi was at work on his fourth studio when he died, no less than TEN studio albums have hit stores since, and that’s not including the wealth of live albums and compilations.

These studio sets range from pretty decent (First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, South Saturn Delta) to really fucking awful (the heavily overdubbed Crash Landing). Most of them attempt to capture that “definitive” last album Jimi was working on when he died. But without Jimi’s input, that will likely never happen.

With all of that history in mind, the Hendrix estate is giving it another go, this time with a set of mostly uneleased studio stuff called Valleys of Neptune.



1. Stone Free
2. Valleys of Neptune
3. Bleeding Heart
4. Hear My Train A-Comin’
5. Mr. Bad Luck
6. Sunshine Of Your Love
7. Lover Man
8. Ships Passing Through The Night
9. Fire
10. Red House
11. Lullabye For The Summer
12. Crying Blue Rain

Before we get in on the actual album, I want to talk about the format a little bit. Instead of reviewing the CD or a normal download version, I’m reviewing Valleys of Neptune on V-Album. The V-Album is a concept developed by ScatterTunes (www.scattertunes.com). As you may suspect from the name, it’s a virtual album – and when I say album, I mean like ALBUM – vinyl – back in the day. You get the full album in DRM-free mp3 format, but you also get all of the artwork, tons of pictures and some video content. You have to download a special player to launch the V-Album content, but the mp3’s are playable in whatever program you wanna use.

Everything about the V-Album content is high quality too. You click on a song, and the lyrics come up (on Valleys of Neptune, some of these are handwritten by Hendrix himself). This is awesome for someone who used to like to read along with the lyrics the first time you popped in a new record. The pictures and album art/liner notes are all hi-res too. They look great and the high quality mp3s (320, I believe) sound amazing too. The video content – well, on Valleys of Neptune, all you get are some previews of the other Hendrix V-Albums (4 have been reissued along with the new album), but on the other albums you get some making of documentaries.

Best thing about the V-Album though is the price. You can score Valleys of Neptune for $9.99, which is the same price you can get just the mp3s for in digital stores like iTunes. So, if you’re going to purchase by downloading anyway, this is the way to go.

On to the album. One of the things I love about Valleys Of Neptune is that it was recorded mostly by the original Jimi Hendrix Experience line-up. All but the first three tracks feature Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Billy Cox – who replaced Redding briefly in the Experience and also played in the Band of Gypsys – holds down bass on those opening tracks.

There was something magical about that original Experience line-up, even if Hendrix was clearly the bright burning star. The other guys just really felt what the dude was doing. Not to take anything away from Cox, who was around for some of Jimi’s more out there stuff.

So, when it comes to sonic appeal, Valleys of Neptune is amazing. The mastering on this record is just untouchable, with a warm, spacey vibe throughout – everything sounds crisp too, belying the fact that these guys were working with 40-year old unfinished masters.

Another great thing is that, unlike other Hendrix posthumous albums, these cuts are mostly unfucked with. Only “Mr. Bad Luck” and closer “Crying Blue Rain” feature overdubs put in after Hendrix’s death, and those were done in 1987 by Redding and Mitchell with help from Hendrix session musician Rocki Dzidzornu with help from notable producer Eddie Kramer.

So, out of all the other Hendrix studio albums released after 1970, Valleys of Neptune sounds the most like a real Hendrix album. It also helps that most of the material was recorded in the same two or three sessions, all within a couple months of each other in 1969. So you get a comprehensive view of where Hendrix was heading at that time. Aside from the sonic cohesiveness, the vibe of the album also holds it together – everything hangs together at a mellow pace, with Hendrix guitar pyrotechnics backed by the Experience’s tight mid-tempo groove throughout most of the album.

The only thing that might give non-Hendrix completists pause on this album is the tracklisting. While it boasts all unreleased material, there are a lot of songs themselves that look familiar. Tracks like “Stone Free”, “Fire”, “Red House” and many more have saturated Hendrix’s canon before and after his death, so how can these “new” studio versions give us anything really new?

Well, surprisingly, they do. And, at the risk of sounding cliché, you really haven’t heard the songs quite like this. For instance, hearing “Red House” done clean and in studio is amazing. But the real draw here are the rare tracks like the title track and “Ships Passing Through The Night” are finally welcomed to the official Jimi Hendrix discography on this album, and they make an immediate impact.

The bottom line is this – 40 years and ten albums after his death, the Jimi Hendrix estate has finally brought us something fresh, and that in and of itself is a hell of a feat.

The 411: So many posthumous Jimi Hendrix albums have been released to varying degrees of success that just releasing another one is hardly reason enough to celebrate. However, Valleys Of Neptune, the first Hendrix studio set in 13 years, has proven that the Hendrix vault still has some tricks up its sleeve. The key to the album is that it’s giving us something we’ve never heard before – and it follows through on that. You go from the exceedingly rare tracks like “Crying Blue Rain” and “Ships Passing Through The Night” – which live up to the hype – to new takes on classics like “Red House” and “Stone Free”; Valleys Of Neptune is full of clean and cohesive sounding Jimi Hendrix Experience era goodness. The stars have all aligned on this one – from the skilled engineers who cleaned up the masters to the fact that the set is drawn from one definitive time period – and the result is stunning. A must have, even for Hendrix beginners.

Final Score:  8.0   [ Very Good ]