Hilton Valentine - All In Your Head (Reissue, Remastered) (1969/2009)

Even many committed Animals fans don't know that the group's guitarist, Hilton Valentine, did an obscure 1970 album in which he stepped from the sideman shadow to sing and write his own material. But while fellow ex-Animal Alan Price had done this with considerable success, and Eric Burdon had launched a fairly successful solo career of sorts when he fronted a new version of the Animals (and later War), Valentine's LP was consigned to instant collector's item status. With production by another ex-Animals guitarist, Vic Briggs (who joined after Valentine left), it's actually not such a bad record, sounding at times a little like a more modestly talented variation on the rustic folky rock of British blokes such as Ronnie Lane. But neither is it a particularly memorable one, emphasizing low-key, wistfully gentle tunes with a touch of Baroque production and orchestration. Valentine's singing is serviceable and suitable for the watching-the-river-flow-after-the-storm mood, but nothing on the order of, say, Burdon, or even Price, to take two convenient points of comparison. It's least successful when it ventures into country-vaudeville-influenced material (especially on "Little Soldier"), and best when it's at its most fragile and tuneful ("Everything Return to Me"). Overall he sounds like too gentle a soul to weather the storms of the music business, such is the nearly guileless naiveté of his outlook.