JIMI HENDRIX — The Cry of Love (review)

JIMI HENDRIX — The Cry of Love album cover Album · 1971 · Jazz Related Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
Viewed by all experts as the legit album following the Gypsies affair , Cry Of Love was more or less finished when Hendrix’ untimely death happened. Dropped is the Gypsies or Experience names, Jimi’s band consisted of him and Mitch Mitchell (drums) and sometimes army buddy Billy Cox, but we know that Jimi recorded the bass many times in the studio in lieu of his bassist, Cox being mostly for concert and gigs purposes. I have no idea whether the strange artwork was to be accepted by Jimi, though. On this album, it is mostly short song format between 3:30 and 5 minutes, which unfortunately doesn’t leave much room for Jimi’s pyrotechnics, but the mastery is exerted in a different manner as he concentrates on serving the verse/chorus song structure.

Starting with the powerful Freedom, filled with outstanding guitar interventions, but it’s followed by the slower Drifting where he phases his guitar dreamily, but the track is slightly soporific. Ezy Rider is bizarrely muffled, no doubt intentionally and for experimental purposes. Songs like Night Bird Flying shows us that Jimi was still writing tracks of the same 60’s manner, but in this album, they not only sound dated, but anachronic. Closing on a slow blues called My Friend; CoL is not the superb album that was going to make you forget the superb Electric Ladyland album.

The flipside starts on the promising but heard-elsewhere Straight Ahead, while Astro Man is again muffled , Angel being the equivalent of Drifting on it’s a-side.. The wilder (all things relative) In From The Storm is one of the few highlight of CoL, while the closing Belly Button blues is ending the album, much the same way My Friend hazd on the other side of the disc.

It’s difficult giving this album more than the average/good rating, because of the normal song structures being given priority over the more daring and wilder stuff. Note that this album's title comes from the tour of the same name that took place some 8 months before, but it's not certain Jimi would've called it that.
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