By 1980, the Wilson sisters and their band Heart were in a state of uncertainty. Guitarist Roger Fisher had left the band and the musical scene had changed from album rock to…well, there wasn\u2019t a whole lot of certainty there, either. On one side, you had punk; another side, disco gasping its final breaths; a third side, hard rock. Coming off their Dog And Butterfly<\/i> disc, which was already questioning where their musical hearts (no pun intended) lay, it was no wonder that confusion reigned supreme in the Heart camp.<\/p>\n
As an answer, the band recruited guitarist\/songwriter Sue Ennis and released Bebe Le Strange<\/i>, a disc that tried to reconcile the gentle acoustic side of Heart that had always been present in the band with all three genres.<\/p>\n
Big, big<\/i><\/b> mistake. What should have been an album to build on the musical success of Dog And Butterfly<\/i> ends up a confused mess, difficult to listen to and hardly worth the listener\u2019s time.<\/p>\n
This disc spawned a hit in \u201cEven It Up\u201d — a track that, sadly, is probably the best on the whole disc. In terms of singles that Heart had released to that point, it hardly qualified as their best work, but stopped short of being as bad as, say, \u201cHeartless.”<\/p>\n
Where Heart could have saved some serious face is on the track \u201cRockin\u2019 Heaven Down,\u201d a power ballad that could have easily been a track to single-handedly save this disc. That is, had the ending of the song not been drawn out incessantly. Chop a good two minutes off this song, and you have a definite winner. As it is now, the extended end kills the forward progress the song made.<\/p>\n
You want punk\/hard rock? Heart tries to answer this request with \u201cBreak,\u201d an adreanaline-powered, poorly-thought-out track that is more puked out than played. Sorry, gang, but this was never a speed metal band. You want disco? \u201cStrange Night\u201d is your answer\u2026 wait, no, it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a weak ploy to try to latch onto a dying musical trend, and not doing so successfully.<\/p>\n
You want the gentle side of Heart? There\u2019s the rare success in this category with the acoustic guitar break \u201cSilver Wheels,\u201d which knows when to make a graceful exit and clocks in at just around 90 seconds. To be honest, I\u2019d have preferred to hear more music like this on Bebe Le Strange<\/i>. The other gentle songs in this vein, \u201cPilot\u201d and \u201cSweet Darlin\u2019,\u201d just do not have the songwriting power behind them to create a good song, so even if the performance had been good it wouldn\u2019t have made for a decent track.<\/p>\n
The re-issue of Bebe Le Strange<\/i> throws on an additional two tracks of crap. \u201cJackleg Man\u201d is proof positive that, sometimes, leaving songs on the cutting floor is a good thing. The other track is a live version of \u201cBreak\u201d — great, just what we all needed. I can\u2019t believe they actually played this loser live, or that someone thought it would be a good idea to release this as a bonus track.<\/p>\n
Bebe Le Strange<\/i> somewhat lives up to its title in that it is a strange album for Heart, trying to cover several different musical genres while pleasing no fans of any of them. Of all the albums from the early portion of Heart\u2019s career, this is one to definitely stay away from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5634],"rating":[5616],"class_list":["post-40475","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-heart","rating-rating-d"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40475"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}