But a larger problem is that Heart really has nothing to say: no ideas animate these songs, and you get the dismaying feeling that nothing motivates them except the stipulations of their recording contract. Despite Ann Wilson's being in fine voice, she just has nothing interesting to sing. Where their somewhat unique status as a female rock band might have generated some fresh, insightful material, Heart seemed to deliberately shy away from anything that might have been interpreted as subversive, sticking instead to banal tropes: "High Time" and "Cook with Fire" are about as exciting as those cliches would lead you to expect, and even the album's hit, the simmering "Straight On," is a bit methodical. "Mistral Wind" eventually builds up a head of steam, but only after its squandered a patient listener's good faith with a ponderous opening section. Only the title track transcends the middle-of-the-road blandness, largely because there's something campy about how earnestly they try to put across the young-girl-emerging-from-her-chrysalis shtick.
Regardless of its flaws and merits, Dog & Butterfly certainly captures Heart voluntarily experimenting with their established style in a way they felt comfortable with. The same can't be said of their next album, Bebe Le Strange. By 1980, bands like Heart had come to be seen as arena-rock dinosaurs, forcing many to respond with new-wave inflected albums pitched at varying levels of desperation. Some of these were brilliant reinventions (Fleetwood Mac's Tusk), others were awkward revelations of how tenuous the grasp can be on one's own identity (Linda Ronstadt's Mad Love).
Bebe Le Strange is certainly awkward, but that's not due to stylistic stretching but to their effort to have it both ways, to have Zeppelin vamps like "Down on Me" (not to be confused with the Janis Joplin roof-raiser) coddled aside pulsing, staccato tracks like "Break". Some of it feels as underwritten as Dog & Butterfly, (there's the by-now-standard Nancy Wilson vanity instrumental, "Silver Wheel", tossed in), but the greater attention to detail apparent on the new-wavy numbers makes it feels like a bit more was at stake. The guitars are given a dry treatment, sometimes with a belchy chorus effect added, and they are as likely to fly into discordant (i.e. "edgy") runs of notes and atonal screeching as they are into familiar soloing patterns. And while Wilson sounds a bit silly when she's tries to twist her misty-mountain banshee wail into something like a bratty Missing Persons squeak, there's less posturing in her voice overall -- she sounds loose and comfortable on the Stones knockoff, "Even It Up" and the title track, but no amount of vocal charisma could have rescued "Raised on You," a schmaltzy, bouncy piano tune worthy of Billy Joel. But as liberating as their experiments might have proved to be, Heart was unwilling to risk anything that might dislodge the band from its comfortable perch as the female face of corporate rock. When the spirit of the times turned against the mass-produced culture-industry product at the turn of the decade, for that very brief moment, for example, when a yet-to-be-co-opted MTV opened a new audience's eyes and ears to a vast eclectic array of innovative music, Heart was without their sales niche. After this record, they would go underground commercially for a few years, only to return, stocked with the best, most homogenous and emotionally reductive songs an army of music-industry songwriting hacks could contrive and armored in corsets and coiffed with enormous. hairstyles for glitzy, deliriously excessive videos, to reclaim their throne when corporate rock yet again emerged triumphant.
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