le Strange is advertised as rocking harder than Heart's earlier albums. What this really boils down to is that the fragile, sensitive calculation of last year's Dog and Butterfly has been replaced here by overt, noisy calculation. Which ought to make the new LP more honest. I guess, but it doesn't work that way. Instead, Bebe le Strange is a strident, graceless disc that doesn't so much touch all the bases as grind them into the ground.

The basic strategy remains the same as on all previous Heart records: mix together enough different styles simultaneously and maybe you'll be mistaken for an original. To cop a title ("Down on Me") from Janis Joplin, for instance, is forgivable. But for Ann Wilson to ape Joplin's raspy shrieks to jack up the song's climaxes isn't. Nor is trying to cover your tracks by utilizing the guitar hook from the Beatles' "I Want You."

Most of the rock & roll on Bebe le Strange is trite heavy-metal riffing, gussied up with slatherings of acoustic overdubs, frenzied and overworked lead vocals, meant-to-be-ethereal harmonies and banks of synthesizer slush. The compositions and their arrangements don't emerge from any melodic continuity or context. Indeed, the tunes are just one tease after another, designed solely to provide mechanical excitement. The whole slick package is meant to bowl you over through sheer overkill – to simulate passion where none exists–and the borrowings are so promiscuous that the final effect is numbing. It's like Cheap Trick without the wit or the looney-tune madness.

This musical clutter wouldn't be so grating if the songs had any substance. But the material is formulaic and thin, no more than an excuse to strike such tough-chick poses as the fuck-me-in-my-Danskins of "Strange Night" and the hoo-ha-we-is-some-ballsy-rock-&-roll-ladies of "Rockin Heaven Down" or the bombastic title track. Heart practices knee-jerk writing–clichés dressed up with rhetoric, as if all you needed to do was punch buttons marked jealousy or craziness to evoke a response. And just in case the badass cuts don't make it on the radio, the Wilson sisters have hedged their bets with some gauzier stuff: e.g., the Joni Mitchell-sounding "Sweet Darlin" and "Pilot." But since these numbers don't have any more emotional conviction than the others, they merely underline the manipulation of Bebe le Strange