In a lot of ways, Funkadelic’s second album feels like an echo of the first. In the heart of the record, you get some single-worthy acid-soul cuts with hit potential, spanning both ends of the R&B-psychedelia continuum while making it feel less of a straight line than an Ouroboros. And the first and last tracks are both wigged-out journeys through a fully dilated third eye, all reverb and yelling and pitch-tweaked creature voices and phantasmagorical prayers. There are some crucial differences, however. One of them is that the band personnel is more centralized and sans session players; Bernie Worrell, having charged his way valiantly through Funkadelic highlight “I Got A Thing,” is now the full-time keyboard player. Another difference separating this album from its predecessor is that Clinton reputedly got the band to record the whole thing in a day or so while tripping on LSD. So this is one of those special instances where, if somebody experiencing this album claims that “they must’ve been high when they came up with this,” you can at least nominally confirm their suspicion.

And what do you know — it worked. The titular opening track isn’t the most coherent thing in the world: it segues from a Forbidden Planet synth-burble soup into a stereo-panning nightmare of spark-throwing instrumentation so overdriven it’s easy to mistake Worrell’s organ for Hazel’s guitar. All the while, Clinton and Ray Davis howl maniacal liberation urges in an attempt to escape their mental traps (“I can’t feel me, I can’t live me, I can’t be me/ My mind, it does not belong to me/ I’m so confused”), and Tiki Fulwood’s metronomic drumming is the hand that stays on yours to make sure you’re not setting a panic-driven route to the window. But en route to “Eulogy And Light” and its ingenious Psalm 23-warping deconstruction of ghetto-capitalist mentality — “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poverty/ I must feel their envy/ For I am loaded, high and all those other goodies/ That go along with the good god big buck” — there’s a staggering amount of soul-searching intensity, almost all of it harrowing, beautiful, damning, and life-affirming all at once.

The pendulum-vertigo sway of “Friday Night, August 14th” and the buzzsaw blues of “Funky Dollar Bill” pair up for a clever stretch of internal struggle — splurge your income tax return one moment, think over just how that process corrupts the people around you the next — in one of their first stabs at intra-album thematic unity. “I Wanna Know If It’s Good To You” is a love song heavier than almost any heart can handle, riding on both astounding soul-sonnet lyrics (“You make my heartbeat sweeter than the honey that replaced the rain since I met you”) and the grimiest desert-sun distorto-rock that Jimi Hendrix never got the chance to be humbled by. And “Some More” fantastically corrupts contemporary soul by rearranging 1966’s Clinton-penned Debonaires single “Headache In My Heart” into a lurching liquid-brained nightmare with the kind of aluminum-cavern production rarely heard until King Tubby sat at the controls. Stay away from drugs, kids — if only because there’s no way you’ll do anything under the influence as revelatory as this.