No Heavy Petting

Another under-heard gem from the Schenker era of UFO, No Heavy Petting may be in fact their strongest long player and contains multiple songs that stayed in their live set for decades, as evidenced on the fabulous live album Strangers in the Night. Opening with the one-two punch of riff-steamroller "Natural Thing" and schizoid "I'm a Loser," and following with the Motörhead/Stooges-uppercut of "Can You Roll Her," side A is a bleak tour through England's seamy rock-n-roll underbelly. That's a song about addiction (presumably dedicated to the woman on the cover with a monkey on her back), a song about couch-surfing, and a song presumably about sketchy blacked-out sex, right in a row. The rest of the record goes off on a few wild tangents, including the moody, proto-stoner street rumble "On With the Action" and the cosmic homesickness of "Martian Landscape," perhaps betraying a longing for UFO's past as a hippyish, happy-drug space rock band. That's not to say there's no filler on this - the junkie love ballad "Belladonna" and the throwaway cover of "A Fool in Love" could've been trimmed, but how many 70's albums are free of fluff? None!
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