Over Heart's eleven-year recording career, the band has often been charged with creating standard-issue stadium rock. That accusation hasn't always been fair: the Wilson sisters and their band mates know how to make the formula yield valid, vital hard pop. On seven of the ten tracks on Bad Animals, they do just that.

Even if Heart had nothing else to offer, its records would be worth the vinyl they're pressed on because of Ann Wilson's voice; time will eventually prove her to be the stylistic forebear of a decade of female Top Forty vocalists. Bad Animals has its requisite dosage of Wilson's sternum-shattering upper register, but it also showcases her increasing restraint and subtlety. Her subdued reading of "Alone" holds an ample supply of palpable 3:00 a.m. loneliness. The menacing "Wait for an Answer" is a sampler of Wilson's textural vocabulary, from the raw silk of her lower register to the jagged edges of her highs.

Surprisingly, four of the five cuts on the album's powerful first side pledge their allegiance not to hard rock but to muscular nightclub pop. "Alone" and "I Want You So Bad" are the vulnerable slow dances; "There's the Girl" and "Who Will You Run To" rock hard without stomping out their radio-ready melodies. With a high-drama outfit like Heart, plain old pop songs are always in danger of getting lost behind outsize musical gestures. That doesn't happen with these songs.

Side two also marries sonic force to pop finesse; it simply has the misfortune of housing the record's three deficient tracks. Arena rock lives by the hook and dies by it: "You Ain't So Tough," "Strangers of the Heart" and "Easy Target" need catchier ones, as well as sharper lyrics in the verses. Despite this wobbly trio of numbers, though, Bad Animals is savvy and spirited; it could give stadium rock a good name. Or a better one, at least. (RS 503)

LAURA FISSINGER