Yeah, yeah, we know, I got a fever, yadda yadda. At this point, Blue Öyster Cult are probably best known for the 2000 Saturday Night Live sketch “More Cowbell,” where Christopher Walken repeatedly demands that the band play up the faint cowbell in their 1975 hit single “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” and we all had a good laugh. But the sketch barely scratches the surface of the fascinating, strange depths of BÖC’s music. The band started off as basically a vessel for the vision of rock critic Sandy Pearlman, who filled their lyrics with convoluted mythology and gave the band rock music’s very first decorative umlaut. And despite their goal of being “the American Black Sabbath,” BÖC didn’t really sound like any rock music of the time, to the point where Eric Bloom could call his rhythm guitar “stun guitar” and nobody would think to ask why. In this episode, Phil leads Dan, Mike, and Rich through Secret Treaties, the pinnacle of the band as a cohesive vision, featuring a lyrical cameo by Patti Smith and the story of a U.S. Supreme Court justice who steals people’s eyeballs. You know, like people do.

Do not attempt to adjust your podcast apps. Discord & Rhyme is devoting the whole month of January to the world of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, better known as P-Funk. Though P-Funk eventually came to comprise a single, massive collective of musicians releasing records under the names Parliament and Funkadelic, the two sides of P-Funk have different sounds and histories, and in this episode and the next, we’re going to dive in to what makes each one supergroovalistic. We’re starting with Funkadelic, as Phil takes Ben, Dan, and Mike through 1971’s Maggot Brain, a ragged, scuzzy, surreal album that some consider P-Funk’s crowning achievement. And be sure to come back in two weeks, when Mike will be covering Parliament’s masterpiece Mothership Connection, thus completing the P-Funk cosmology.

Do we really need to introduce Aretha Franklin? Undisputedly the best soul singer around — perhaps the best singer, period — her string of massive hits and modern classics is longer than some other artists’ entire careers. Her voice is so recognizable now that it’s easy to take for granted, but when she moved to Atlantic Records in 1967 and released I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, she made gospel-style music blare from American radios at a volume then unheard of, and with a confident feminist swagger.

Yikes — things are getting a little brown on this episode of Discord & Rhyme. For his first outing as host, Phil Maddox leads his co-hosts through New Hope, PA, alternative rock duo Ween’s highly idiosyncratic and mildly sophomoric 1997 release The Mollusk. Ween initially gained notoriety in the early ’90s, when major labels were snapping up every weird band under the sun in search of the next Nirvana, and it was awesome. The band is best known for its grating MTV hit “Push th’ Lil’ Daisies,” but The Mollusk is more of a loving homage to progressive rock and sea shanties — with a few jarring doses of Ween humor. Rated R for language.