Knowing what I do of George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic output, I was expecting the kind of prog-funk that makes up most of this album. What I was not expecting was the opening, eponymous, track that is largely a guitar solo from Eddie Hazel that blends the high, sustained, mournful notes of David Gilmour with the fuzzy, grungy licks of Jimi Hendrix, over the top of a barely-there piano riff, with applied echo effects and stereo panning to make a gorgeous dreamlike sound.
I recognised the second track, Can You Get To That, featuring both the vocal harmonies of Isaac Hayes’ backing group Hot Buttered Soul, and the practically subterranean vocals of Raymond Davis; it was used as the theme song to an Australian comedy-drama Sisters.
The rest are similar modernised funk – what Wikipedia calls “psychedelic funk”, but in my mind I called “acid funk”, and are all pretty good tracks. As with the Serge Gainsbourg album, this one is bookended by longer tracks – Maggot Brain at the start and Wars of Armageddon at the end, which is more of a funk odyssey than Maggot Brain, echoing its themes of global destruction and showing elements of Frank Zappa with the wet fart noises towards the end. Glorious stuff.
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