"Moods" Album Description:
This one isn’t 1967 Hendrix kicking the door off its hinges. This is the early-’70s aftershock: a posthumous patchwork sold under the Hendrix name, pressed on TRIP (TLP-9512 / SLT-00861), built from earlier recordings and odds-and-ends that don’t pretend to be a neat “album” in the proper sense. (Depending on which discography you trust, you’ll see it dated around 1971 or filed under 1974.)
The tell is in the feel. You drop the needle and it doesn’t march in like "Are You Experienced" or "Axis: Bold as Love". It wanders. It shuffles. It shows up in fragments, like someone emptied a box of tapes onto the carpet and called it a mood board. Some of these tracks trace back to the mid-’60s on paper, long before the big stage and the purple mythology. That contrast is the whole point — and also the problem.
I’ve always thought records like this live their real life in the places they’re usually found: the secondhand rack, the dusty “H” divider, the sleeve a bit tired at the corners, the label staring back in blunt black-and-white. You buy it half curious, half suspicious. Then you get home, clean it, and realize: it’s not “essential Hendrix,” but it’s weirdly revealing — not because it’s a masterpiece, but because it’s messy.
The track list on this LP — “A Mumblin' Word”, “Miracle Worker”, “From This Day On”, “Human Heart”, and the rest — plays like a collage more than a statement. It’s not here to summarize an era. It’s here to remind you how easily an artist’s name gets used as packaging once the artist can’t argue back.
