Again, plucked from my trip through the Allmusic guide, the only one of the big 3 JHE albums I'd not heard. Maybe this is criminal that I'm just now hearing these albums, but sometimes you've heard the singles so many times that you think you've heard the albums, your assumptions about what they sound like filling the space of actual potential memories, until you finally snap out of it.
This one has a lot less critical/social heft than Are You Experienced? or Electric Ladyland, and has almost none of his best-known songs, but its frankly no worse for it. In fact, maybe because its newer to me, I found my first experience with this album fresher and more exciting than my encounter with AYE?, and certainly more streamlined than my exposure to the epic-length Ladyland.
The songs are short, catchy, propulsive and enjoyable - this is probably the most fun of his albums, and that counts for a lot. And of course, it goes without saying that the guitar sound is blisteringly ferocious, the playing occasionally blindingly deft - though I was especially taken taken by Spanish Castle Magic and Little Wing. Its hard to rate an album like this, by an artist that is such an established god. How do you escape the gravity of the achievement, the context of then, and the context of now, to just give it what you thought. Like this, I guess 4.5/5
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