Pat Benatar made a minor breakthrough last year with Get Nervous, her best job yet of singing hard rock without wrenching her voice out of shape. But those gains have been tossed right out the window on Live from Earth, a poorly recorded, poorly played and, above all, poorly sung live album that sacrifices her lovely, potent voice at the altar of hard-rock bombast. Some of it's downright embarrassing. Benatar takes her strutting, screaming Joplinesque-rocker role to silly extremes, guitarist Neil Geraldo and company bash out an insensitive metallic roar, and the entire record has the murkiest, muddiest sound quality of any major live album in years.

Remember Benatar's clean, poppish hit single "Heartbreaker"? Here, it's cluttered, rushed and hoarsely shouted out over a batch of sloppy power chords. Remember "Hit Me with Your Best Shot"? It's similarly butchered. Remember ... well, never mind. For the record, "Fire and Ice" and "We Live for Love" are given the least destructive renditions.

Following the eight live songs, Benatar gives us a pair of new studio tunes. "Love Is a Battlefield" and "Lipstick Lies" are hardly masterpieces, but they are this band's modestly adventurous attempts to use keyboards more fully than before. The former song locks into a lilting, melodic synth-pop dance groove while Benatar uses her still formidable voice to soar rather than to croak. The relative success of the studio tracks only makes what precedes them more confounding. (RS 409)

STEVE POND