The Test Tube and the Scale

  Like the venerated John Coltrane before him, Carlos Santana charted his enthrallment with Eastern religious traditions by recording music that sometimes played like galvanized cognitive workouts. Unlike Coltrane, Santana often fashioned records for a pop audience, a practice he shared with that other Western devotee of physical transcendence, George Harrison. Because Santana’s musical style was grounded in Latino influenced Afro-Caribbean rhythms, propelling songs out of the mire of religious lyrical dogma, the band’s     marriage of spirituality and pop sometimes succeeded where often others’ didn’t. In 1976 the band released Amigos, a seven track LP that opened with the two part, 8:15 samba, Dance Sister Dance. Sung by new vocalist Greg Walker, the record’s first part is an R&B influenced rhythmic treatise that reinvigorates the age old pop formula, sensuality plus kinesics equals beauty. A rhythm section made up of bassist David Brown, drummer Leon Ndugu Chancler...

Almost midway into Damaged Goods, from Gang of Four’s debut record Entertainment!, Andy Gill’s serrated guitar goes silent, making room for this banner headline advertising romantic idealism, “Heated couplings in the sun,” quickly followed by the caveat emptor, “or is that untrue?” For their cover version of Damaged Goods, the Hotrats do something similar, but the breaks between verses and instrumentation aren’t as starkly drawn as they are on the original version. Comprised of Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey of Supergrass, the Hotrats released the covers LP Turn Ons in 2010.    Made up of mostly quintessential British rock numbers, and three Americans, the Hotrats distills the pop essence of each chosen song, revealing, unsurprisingly, a commonality of craft—a shared musical language—that’s been in widespread play since at least the time of the British Invasion. The democratization of Damaged Goods makes hearing the song’s double meanings difficult because its multivalent perspe...