The general feeling among fans who bootlegged the bejesus out By Way Of The Drum was that MCA shelved the album in 1989 because the label didn’t get what they expected. And with the masters found a couple decades later, when the legacy of P-Funk felt far deeper than any late-’80s comeback attempt would hint at, you could say most fans who’d only heard rumor of it didn’t get what they expected, either — at least not unless they expected an overproduced, laminated funk record that sonically lagged six steps behind Prince. The band’s vitally raw freakiness is tamped down by edge-dulling gloss; even the logo on the title track’s original ’89 12″ release omits the skull over the “i” in “Funkadelic”.

This vault exhumation is technically more of a legit Funkadelic record than the infamous 1981 FINO hijack job Connections & Disconnections, thanks to the actual presence of George Clinton and a few P-Funk vets like Garry Shider and Dewayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight in the ranks. But with no sign of either Bootsy or Bernie, it’s still something of a ringer, especially in the moments Shider’s guitar isn’t wailing; the rest of the time it sounds like a bunch of hired hands concocting some okay-I-guess boogie funk driven by the kind of drum machines people like to invoke when they claim drum machines have no soul. A go-go take on Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love” is one of those unprecedented moments they stoop to the nostalgia-cover game, “Freaks Bearing Gifts” fails to dredge some party vibes from warnings of child-kidnapper come-ons (“little girl, do you want some candy/little boy, do you want to go for a ride”), the opening lines to “Yadadada” lifts the “Ricky Ricky Ricky, can’t you see” hook from Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” and turns it into an annoying, nasal ode to fancy liquor, and “Some Fresh Delic” is merely a string of uninspired chants and noodly shredding over an unchanging go-go beat. Weirdest of all is the title cut, which would make for a decent electro/New Jack Swing hybrid under a lesser group’s banner but sounds significantly further away of any right-minded notion of what a turn-of-the-’90s Funkadelic would sound like. Thank god Digital Underground were around to fill that duty for a while.