Before ’73’s Cosmic Slop, Funkadelic albums were sprawling, far-out acid rock built on a solid funk/R’n’B foundation. Cosmic Slop saw them moving into shorter, more radio-friendly songs. The production and recording are of a higher quality than some of their earlier work and you can really begin to hear the depth of musical quality from the band too. There’s lean, bare-bones funk, acid psychedelia, gothic-soul and the album ends on a pair of proto-metal hard rockers.

If Maggot Brain is their psychedelic masterpiece and One Nation Under a Groove shows them at their funkiest, then this is the mind-melding (and melting) Funkadelic difference-splitter. Cosmic Slop is deeply intense when it comes to the dramatic moments: its chronicle of strung-out soldiers battling addiction and PTSD, “March to the Witch’s Castle,” is (apologies to “Sam Stone”) far and away the most devastating reckoning with Nam ever recorded. And the love ballads sound unearthly whether they’re celebrating a relationship’s resilience (“Let’s Make It Last”) or mourning its end (“This Broken Heart”). And while there’s plenty of opportunity to revel in get-on-down dance cuts — leadoff “Nappy Dugout” provides one of the more agreeably filthy grooves in the Mothership’s purview — the most indelible one is the title cut, a tale of a woman given to prostitution that swaps out moralistic slut-shaming for finely attuned gospel-steeped empathy. (Its rhetorical counterpart, “Trash A-Go-Go,” is a little more skeptical of your typical pimp’s defense case.) If all that seems a bit heavy for you, just rest assured that groove conquers all.