Funkadelic
Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow

THE REVIEW

Strange things happen. For example, you call your parish priest to wish your father a happy birthday, and of course, he takes the opportunity to say a couple of words to you, a little lecture never hurts. But you hear the sound of the phone by miracle, it's a drop in an ocean: Eddie Hazel covers everything.

His Hendrixian-derived guitar, in cahoots with Bernie Worrell's screeching organ (still a long way from the spacey sound he would develop later), makes quite the racket. By golly, it does! And to think I've listened to plenty of noisier music, and in spades: metal, hard rock, classical, jazz, the Dillinger Escape Plan. Yet what the Funkadelic bring out on the title track of "Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow" is a peculiar intertwining of beautifully screeching and penetrating sounds that leave your ears bleeding, indeed. Not that the entire album is like this (but almost), there's room for some gentler sounds, within the limits of funkadelicism (one of my new religions, so long to the parish priest). In any case, what emerges from the album is an aggressive sound, scrappy. A deliberately rough diamond. As with any respectable album of the Parliafunkadelicment Thang, there is melody, of course: "I Wanna Know If It's Good To You" (BABE!!!), "Funky Dollar Bill", "Some More", or the nice 2005 bonus track "Fish, Chips And Sweat" (fish and chips all over the place!), but it still remains surrounded and seasoned with the wild energy of the ensemble.

The group wanted to see if they could record an album entirely under the influence of acid. They could. Not a masterpiece (it's in that vast limbo between three and four stars, which we'll call 3.5 to make life easier), but a good album, yes, a good album with some bursts of genius. In this second album by Funkadelic (year of our Lord 1970), the wandering discourse begun a few months earlier with the eponymous debut continues; it's black rock, it's psychedelia (at its peak in the conclusive "Eulogy And Light"), it's soul, it's funk, it's Funkadelic.