The Hendrix Estate's latest attempt to trawl through the guitarist's well plundered vault of unreleased recordings to extract a supposedly ‘new’ album is, like 2010's Valleys of Neptune, another somewhat mixed bag. Rather than more outtakes from The Experience sessions, People, Hell and Angels mainly features unreleased alternate versions and outtakes from 1969 with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles (aka the Band of Gypsys), as well as out takes with the Gypsies, Sun and Rainbows line-up, including Cox and Mitch Mitchell and conga player Juma Sultan – the missing link between Hendrix, Miles and Coltrane – and two tracks with Hendrix as a sideman. Highlights of the Cox/Miles cuts include a harder, funkier ‘Earth Blues’ compared to the version overdubbed for Rainbow Bridge; a blistering new version of ‘Hear My Train A Comin’' with fire-breathing improvisation; ‘Hey Gypsy Boy’, a languid low-key blues with spine-tingling, understated lyrical guitar, that turned up heavily overdubbed on the long deleted Midnight Lightning; and a sublime instrumental snatch of ‘Villanova Blues’ showing what a debt Hendrix owed to Wes Montgomery. ‘Easy Blues’ is the pick of the GSR ensemble tracks, and probably the album, with Cox's walking bass and Mitchell's Elvin-esque swing underpinning Hendrix in jazzier mood on an ascending improvisation that climbs to ferocious levels. Meanwhile his 1969 link up with King Curtis-style sax honker, Lonnie Youngblood, on ‘Let Me Love You’ points back to his R&B sideman work with the Isley Brothers and Curtis Knight before he came to the UK in 1966 and changed the guitar landscape forever, but offers no clue to a future direction. Like many of the posthumous Hendrix releases this poses more questions than answers. One of which must be: when are the complete Hendrix and organist Larry Young sessions from New York's Record Plant in 1969 finally going to surface?