Heart - Beautiful Broken album review

Revisiting lost gems, creating new ones.

Heart Beautiful Broken album cover

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An odd one. A new Heart album where much of it isn’t new. What the band have done is dig deep into the catalogue, finding great songs from three almost ignored albums. But it’s not just a case of bringing these up to date, so much as celebrating them.

The likes of Down On Me, Johnny Moon and City’s Burning (which boast subtle lyrical and arrangement changes) prove the albums in question – Bebe Le Strange, Private Audition and Passionworks – should be reassessed as quality records. It’s also clear Ann and Nancy Wilson have carefully chosen these to provide a focused flow.

The title track is a reworking of a bonus song from 2012’s Fanatic, with the guesting James Hetfield lending it extra muscle. And the new songs? Well, Two and Heaven are close to being essential Heart. A fine album that’s more imaginative than reimagining.

Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021