Despite its lazy title, Heart's 1985 set is both their biggest seller (quintuple platinum) and only U.S. chart-topper, spawning four Top 10 singles that collectively made radio safe for Alannah Myles, Jane Child and Roxette. Its best hit, "Never," is a perfectly meaningless Reagan-era AOR/CHR hard-pop confection, like .38 Special on estrogen. The others -- "What About Love?," "These Dreams," "Nothin' At All" -- are more adult-contemporary schlock but still hard to forget. Hi-NRG-turned-pop-metal Pamala Stanley cover "If Looks Could Kill" sticks too, and "The Wolf" swipes licks from "Beat It."
Heart moved into straight-up AOR with this eighth album, employing that '80s guitar sound (just barely echoed, antiseptically clean) and whispered verse/anthemic chorus style that is now and forever linked to that decade, regardless of musical genre. That means that Passionworks may not be what you want to spin on "Awesome '80s Night," but maybe "Forgettable '80s Night." For some reason, this album used to be the hardest Heart record to find. Fans of the band are directed to the end of "Sleep Alone."
Heart mean business right out of the gate. The title track is a grimy nugget, equal parts Houses of the Holy and Who's Next (dig that percolating keyboard lurking in the mix). While Ann Wilson snarls "I'm just a fanatic," all manner of odd sound effects surface, then crumble violently. The majority of the album's lyrics are autobiographical, but as with Heart's best stuff, it's easy to get lost in the onslaught of hooks, riffs and laser-like harmonies. Some of the best are to be found on "Million Miles," a propulsive folk-rocker unpinned by strings and what sounds like John Martyn's Echoplex.
The decade between 1985 and 1995 was a weird one for Heart, if not for all classic rockers still trying to sound as relevant and gutsy as they did in their heyday of feathered hair, custom vans and beaded roach-clips. During the time of these songs, a lot of bands got perms and appeared in videos with sponge-painted backdrops while belting out power ballads. Heart was no exception, but "Surrender to Me" finds Ann Wilson and Cheap Trick's Robin Zander dueting a song that you could totally figure-skate to. And "What About Love" recalls the film era when James Spader played a rich jerk.
Heart's most straightforwardly hard-rocking album, 1980's Bebe Le Strange emerged within months of debuts by Pat Benatar and the Pretenders -- no coincidence, maybe. It starts with the garage-y title cut, a letter from an enraptured (and possibly female) fan, but the real thrash happens in "Break" (even more so on the live bonus version added at reissue's end). "Down on Me" is Janis Joplin-inspired blues; "Rockin' Heaven Down" an ornate "Kashmir" rip; "Strange Night" a new-wave kinky dance club move. And Tower of Power's horns in "Even It Up" probably taught Huey Lewis a thing or two.
The blueprint chug of the guitars along with Ann Wilson's Plant-ish vocal parrying mark "Barracuda" as one of the all-time great rock/early metal songs. The rest of Little Queen, Heart's second album, finds them cementing their rep as the most Zeppelin-y band of all time, effortlessly moving from rockers to tree-worshipping folk-rock to FM balladry.
The then-hard rock band's third album, Magazine, is marked by the spacey heaviness of "Magic Man" and the folk-touched Zeppelin-III-like appeal of Dreamboat Annie. Their able cover of the Pete Ham-penned/Harry Nilsson-owned "Without You" effectively flexes Ann Wilson's considerable vocal muscle, and opener "Heartless" offers fans of their rocking songs something to sink their teeth into. But, in the end, Heart seem more comfortable laying back with acoustic guitars.
Heart's most straightforwardly hard-rocking album, 1980's Bebe Le Strange emerged within months of debuts by Pat Benatar and the Pretenders -- no coincidence, maybe. It starts with the garage-y title cut, a letter from an enraptured (and possibly female) fan, but the real thrash happens in "Break" (even more so on the live bonus version added at reissue's end). "Down on Me" is Janis Joplin-inspired blues; "Rockin' Heaven Down" an ornate "Kashmir" rip; "Strange Night" a new-wave kinky dance club move. And Tower of Power's horns in "Even It Up" probably taught Huey Lewis a thing or two.
Released in 1982, Private Audition bridges the gap between Heart's hard rock beginnings and the power-ballad domination they re-invented themselves with later on in the decade and into the '90s -- most evidently on "Perfect Stranger," which is practically a blueprint for the dramatics to come. Elsewhere they play with jazz ("This Man Is Mine"), the '70s FM/roach-clip-rock of yore ("City's Burning") and, with the title cut, they successfully pull off a Queen-level of weirdness (think "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon" from A Night At The Opera).
Despite the fact that the album art is on the short list of the most awful '80s covers (Queen's Some Kind of Magic is the bar by which all others are judged here) and that the Wilson sisters wrote almost none of it, Bad Animals remains a true touchstone of '80s music thanks to the one-two punch of "Who Will You Run To" and "Alone." The former is one of the most infinitely sing-able songs of the decade (quite possibly the ultimate karaoke number) and "Alone" is simply the only song to sing to that special someone while standing in a downpour.
As on 2004's sadly slept-on Jupiters Darling, the Wilson sisters hark much closer here to their unicorn-rock '70s than their pop-schlock '80s. Their patented Airplane-Zeppelin hybrid remains unrivaled, and, for a surprising mid-set stretch, near unstoppable: Seattle sea chantey "Queen City"; pulsing pastoral "Hey You"; hard-swung shuffle "Wheels"; witchy-woman rave-up "Saffronia's Mark"; grunge dirge "Death Valley"; green-thumb beauty "Sunflower." If too many metaphors rely on inclement Northwest weather, the folk colorings -- mandolin, dobro, banjo -- make the rain ring true.
With Ann and Nancy Wilson contributing on almost every song, Desire Walks On announces the band's return to super-cool hard-rocking witchey-ness with the trippy 18-second intro "Desire" and the freight-train-heavy "Black on Black II." "Rage" is another welcome throwback to their roots, but with the inclusion of Mutt Lange's "Will You Be There (in the Morning)," Desire Walks On has something to offer fans of either Heart era.
There's plenty of meditative me-decade amorphousness on Heart's 1978 Dog and Butterfly. If the low-focus cocktail-jazz shambling of "Hijinx" serves as a tasty link between Steely Dan and Quarterflash, the string-sectioned power-ballad bombast of "Lighter Touch" foresees Heart's own schmaltzy '80s. But "Cook With Fire," and especially "Straight On," vamp in tangibly funky ways -- the latter isn't far from Donna Summer's Bad Girls rock-disco a year later. And the folkishly fragile title track faces the older-and-colder inevitability of aging like a true daughter of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide."
Heart continued to release unconscionable cover art with this 1990 album, but they still had one last Top 10 hit in them, "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You," one of the all-time great odes to anonymous sex in a hotel room. Also, "Secret" resurrects the old Bad Animals magic, and the Sammy Hagar/Ann and Nancy Wilson-written hard rocker "The Night" is far and away one of their best songs of the whole era, and proves that unless they're bringing the house down with a power ballad, Heart sound best when they sound like Led Zeppelin.
It's difficult to believe Strange Euphoria is the first box set dedicated to Heart, one of classic rock's most celebrated acts. Luckily, longtime fans won't be disappointed with its unorthodox programming. For many of their biggest hits (including "Barracuda," "Magic Man" and "Crazy on You") Heart chose to include demo and live versions. These are definitely cool to hear. So are the myriad recordings from the Wilson sisters' other projects, namely Ann Wilson & The Daybreaks and The Lovemongers. This more acoustic-flavored stuff shows off West Coast folk-rock's profound influence on them.
Much in the vein of Johnny Cash's American Recordings released the year before, The Road Home is Ann and Nancy Wilson re-embracing their baroque-folk roots. It's a refreshing change of pace, considering Heart had hit both an artistic and commercial brick wall with the power-ballad formula that made them MTV darlings the previous decade. With production aid from Zep legend John Paul Jones, the sisters re-imagine just about every one of their big hits, from "Crazy on You" and "Barracuda" to "Alone" and "These Dreams." The only egregious omission is the amazing "Magic Man" -- why, Heart, why?
