Not George Clinton, not the P-Funk All-Stars, not even Parliament-Funkadelic — this is an actual Funkadelic record, something that nobody’d seen since 1981. Call it semantics if you want — with the core members who’ve passed since The Electric Spanking Of War Babies (Garry Shider, Tiki Fulwood, Eddie Hazel, Glen Goins, and Cordell “Boogie” Mosson, to name a few), skeptics might consider this an All-Stars kind of effort anyhow, even considering the number of performances brought out from the vaults and stitched posthumously into the tracks. But as the most overstuffed and stylistically experimental thing to come out of the P-Funk camp possibly ever, pinning it down to any one idea of what’s previously been offered under the Funkadelic name is beside the point. It’s not out of the question to expect an uneven effort from a three-plus-hour triple album with thirty-three tracks (one for each year Funkadelic was in storage). And maybe it’s hard to cut through all that to separate the fine from the mediocre; there’s not much further on either end of the scale, whether it’s outright stinkers or mind-boggling brilliance. But it does successfully put forth the idea of a version of P-Funk that incorporates a lot of familiar trademarks — beautifully dazed close harmonies, deathless roller-boogie bounce, a philosophical notion of funk that permeates everything, no matter how far away it strays from “One Nation Under A Groove” — while remaining wide open to brand new ideas.

And no doubt, a lot of these new ideas are weird, which is just about right for a band that’s made weirdness one of their load-bearing structures. Clinton’s vision of Afro-futurism has always demanded taking in new styles and ideas, and he’s stated more than once that “whenever I hear people — like older musicians — saying about something new, ‘That ain’t music,’ I rush and find that music.” So you get his weathered, gravelly voice filtered through Auto-Tune on multiple tracks, there are excursions into trap beats (“Get Low”) and groove metal (“Dirty Queen”, featuring his grandson Trafael Lewis’s band God’s Weapon), and the plentiful moments that feel like archetypal funk are deliriously warped into 21st century forms. A few cuts could be slipped into a playlist alongside current-gen heirs from Janelle Monae to Thundercat to Dam-Funk and sound like their contemporaries instead of their forebears — soul-jazz fusion flight “Fucked Up,” the floaty house-adjacent boogie slide “In Da Kar,” the Organized Noise/Future-ist vamp “The Wall,” and the Michael Hampton-laced g-funk ballad “Where Would I Go?” prove as much. The old-school cohorts from back in the day (including a game Sly Stone) generally pull cameo duty, while the prominence of 808 beats and guest MCs foreground the here-and-now focus. And if that sounds like an admission that it’d be impossible to perfectly recapture the spirit of Cosmic Slop, it’s just as well, since what they stir up here is its own kind of immersively sprawling 2010s kind of thing. Underrated upon release and overshadowed by the concurrent release of his essential autobiography Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You?: A Memoir, this record’s a valiant, usually successful effort at proving that a man who was one of the sharpest creative minds of the ’70s could still flourish in his 70s.