Too Hot to Handle

There is a looseness to this track that its heavier siblings on the same album don't quite have — a swagger that comes from the blues rather than from the power chord tradition. The guitar tone has a slightly greasy quality, bending and sliding in ways that suggest heat and humidity rather than cold precision. It is one of the more overtly sexual songs in UFO's catalog without being crass about it, letting the music do the insinuating while the lyrics stay just abstract enough to remain interesting. Mogg sounds completely at ease here, which is itself a kind of seduction — the performance has the confidence of someone who doesn't need to convince you of anything, who assumes the outcome. The rhythm section grooves in a way that the band's faster material doesn't always allow, and that groove is the heart of the song: a locked-in feeling between bass and drums that invites movement. This is the UFO song for someone who came to the band through classic rock radio and wants to understand their range, because it reveals a strand of their identity that the harder material can obscure — their connection to American blues rock, to the humidity of a Southern bar, to music that is fundamentally about bodies in proximity. A summer-evening song, windows down, something cold in your hand.