I forgot how much I love Heart. I place them in that odd category of hit-churning yet highly underrated bands, along with The Kinks.
I just stumbled across a Sound Stage performance on PBS, strangely enough after hearing alot of them on the radio today. They just busted into Black Dog by Zeppelin, after actually bringing me to tears with Love Alive. They even managed to pull out Alone, from the unfortunate "hair" era, with beauty and grace. It's not such a horrible song after all. Just goes to show what unmitigated evil the wrong Peru-snorting producer can inflict upon an otherwise wonderful tune. (Note: I could very well be completely wrong about that, as I have no clue who produced that song. But it sure sounded like a snort-fest at the time.)
Ann bears an uncanny reseblance to mid-90s Rosanne these days, not that there's anything wrong with that necessarily. But oh BOY can she still sing. She has a newish growl to her voice, which is probably symptomatic of nodes on her vocal chords the size of cantaloupes. But she completely nailed every single note to the wall. One of the very greatest rock singers of all time, and I wish more people would remember that.
The band is a little funny looking, but tight as hell. Good lead guitar dude, but his AC-30s sound a little like a freshly-kicked bee hive buried in a gravel pit in a rain storm. Not that there's anything wrong with that either.
And Nancy. Oh, Nancy. Still the hottest of the hottest.
They just don't built bands like that anymore. Listen to Barracuda again. Enough said.
Posted by eric at January 5, 2006 12:15 AM