Sabbath At the time of it's release, Heart's Brigade album was hailed as a return to the band's classic roots. In hindsight, it's more of a turn in the right direction but still 100 miles or so from home.

The best moments on Brigade equate to the best music of Heart's Capitol years. Give them credit for bypassing some of the gloss that made Heart and Bad Animals overly commercial. On tracks like Wild Child, Tall Dark Handsome Stranger, and The Night the band does indeed move into the hard rock / near-metal style that made them famous, and on Under the Sky they show that they still have the ability to put out a good folk tune as they did in the early years. The rest of the album including the collection's big single All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You gets suffocated by the power ballad schmaltz that alienated a lot of their fans in the mid-80s. Interestingly, the only singles released from this album were whiny-sounding ballads (All I Wanna Do, I Didn't Want To Need You, Stranded, Secret) but thankfully we had FM radio to play Wild Child and Tall Dark Handsome Stranger to keep the band from losing all of it's rock street cred.

Brigade is the perfect example of an album that is actually pretty good, but if you only listen to the singles you'd think the band was the female version of Air Supply or Chicago instead of the female Led Zeppelin. People who only heard the singles no doubt think Heart is the whiniest band ever to come out of Seattle, but those who listened to the whole album learned that Heart actually still had it's hard rock chops and Ann Wilson is the best female hard rock singer in the business. The lesson? Next time Heart releases a single skip it and go buy the album. Pu