If there were ever a group that appealed to my instincts as both woman and writer, Heart's the one. In the man's world of hard rock, their orientation is feminine. In an age of conglomerates, they got their start as a national act on a tiny independent label. Their success could be interpreted as blows against the empire. But none of this matters anymore.

Heart used to make a great story. Now they've made a great album.

I don't mean that Dreamboat Annie and Little Queen weren't intriguing records (or, for that matter, Magazine, the hodgepodge released as a settlement of contractual disputes with Mushroom). Right from the start, the Wilson sisters figured there was more to rock and role reversal than tying someone else to the whipping post. They liked the feel of silk as well as heavy metal, and saw no reason why they couldn't build the filigreed harmonies and acoustic intimacy of folk music onto solid rock. Until now, that meant their LPs seemed tacked together, that the heat generated by Ann Wilson's singing leaked out in windy interludes and codas.

Dog & Butterfly is Heart whole: they haven't plastered over the contradictions in their ideas of women's rock, they've lived up to and beyond them. Heart's message–and it's an individual statement, not a political manifesto–is all in its music. The album is forthrightly divided into a boogie side (labeled Dog) and a ballad side (you got it–Butterfly), but for all the artsiness of the conceit, it hangs together better than Dreamboat Annie's song cycle or Little Queen's desegregated tempos. There's a silky dexterity to the rockers, a steel edge to the ballads, no leaks anywhere. The Wilsons used to think that rigidly extended metaphors gave a song punch (making "Barracuda," say, more uptight than taut). Now they're confident enough at rock & roll to play with words, phrases and titles such as "High Time" and "Straight On." It's the melodies that rush into the ring, explode into harmony, bob and weave in teasing syncopation.

Then there are the Butterflies, but they're not the pretty scraps that fluttered right by you on earlier records. These are rock ballads in the Led Zeppelin tradition, exercises in agony and rapture (sometimes both). Full of portentous parables and pseudomysticism, the lyrics read like bad high-school poetry or something you might have said in your sleep. But it doesn't matter. If the words are vague, the emotions are set out in black and white, and the intensity mounts as surely as a stairway to heaven. No more piddling tempo shifts–when such a shift comes, as in "Mistral Wind," it's a stunner, kicking the tune into high gear.

Somehow Heart manages to keep the ache and thunder believable, a sense of dignity amid the bombast. Nancy Wilson's guitar sets elegant counterpoint patterns against the melodies' deep purples and moody blues–her playing is as fresh and welcome as a lucid thought among the lyrics' free associations. There's a clarity to Ann Wilson's voice, a directness. She doesn't fool around much with tone or phrasing, she just gets louder and fiercer. It's not what she's singing, but the singing itself that gets to the point. Her voice slices through band member Howard Leese's beautiful, blowzy arrangements, saying: here, just here, this is where it hurts. It's this passionate precision and this precisely expressed passion that make both the boogie and ballads so persuasive. On Dog & Butterfly, Heart knows what it wants and exactly how to go after it. (RS 279)

ARIEL SWARTLEY