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

Sabbath The best thing about Heart in my opinion is their Zeppelin-esque ability to switch between acoustic folk and hard rock that sometimes crosses the metal barrier without being unmelodic. On Desire Walks On they succeed more often than not, and create a bridge from the overly commercial hair metal sound of their previous three albums back to the more classic sound that made them famous.

The best moments on Desire Walks On start early; the opening track Black on Black II attempts to take an early Lisa Dalbello cover and reimagine it as a metal piledriver with great success. This track is not only the best on the album, but one of the best aggressive hard rock tunes the band performed during their Capitol Records years. Back to Avalon and My Crazy Head are great tunes as well, merging the band's electric and acoustic sounds in the vein of Crazy On You. A couple of other tunes, Rage and a cover of Bob Dylan's Ring Them Bells (with Layne Staley from Alice in Chains making an appearance) make this album a worthwhile listen.

Where the album falls short is in the ballads: The Woman In Me and Anything is Possible are both pedestrian sounding melodies with overly cliche'd lyrics that don't work. Even worse is the Mutt Lange-penned Will You Be There (In the Morning) which hit the Top 40 but is so overly commercial sounding than any one of a hundred different bands could have recorded it.

While this album didn't have a huge number of hits, Will You Be There (In the Morning) hit the pop Top 40 and Black on Black II was a Top 5 Album Rock chart hit and garnered heavy airplay on hard rock and metal stations.

Overall Desire Walks On is a welcome return from Heart's overly commerical 80s material to the darker, heavier, and more authentic sound of their early albums. It's not perfect, but it was well received by critics and those Heart fans who felt alienated by the band's hair metal years.

Unitron Beautiful Broken is the sixteenth studio album from classic hard rock band Heart. The album mostly contains re-workings of some of Heart's early 80's material, with a few new songs mixed in. One of the new songs, the title track, features none other than Metallica's James Hetfield performing vocals along with Ann Wilson.

Out of the new songs, "I Jump" and the title cut are absolutely killer tracks. The former has some stellar guitar riffs reminiscent of Soundgarden, and even some crunching metal riffs in there. The heavy rock and symphonic sound is fused together perfectly, especially on this track. Hetfield and Ann Wilson's vocals are made for each-other on the title cut, both having real strong rock vocals, something that's missing in a lot of modern rock music. "Heaven", while technically not a new song as it appeared on the Alive in Seattle live album, makes it's studio debut here. The song has quite an epic presence to it, with it's mix of droning Indian sounds and powerful vocals.

Listening to the re-workings, you'd never guess they were originally from the 80's. The Pink Floyd-esque "Johnny Moon" is especially much better, sounding a lot more organic with no overproduced drum sound. "City's Burning" is given a grunge-y sound, blended with some really nice string instrumentation. Speaking of strings, the album has an overall symphonic sound to it with string arrangements featured in most of the songs.

While many classic rock acts have either broken up or are living off of past glories, Heart is still making powerful heavy rock that sure delivers the goods. I could do without the ballads, but the other songs definitely make up for that. If you're a fan of Heart and/or powerful hard rock with strong folk and symphonic elements, this is a must-listen.

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