Grade: B+
One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town with a decomposing dead dog on her back. ‘Slow Dog’, from Belly’s debut album Star, was mental and frenetic and possessed the kind of berserk and glorious chorus most bands would kill for. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either — the sincerely odd ‘Gepetto’ and the lowering, nagging almost-hit ‘Feed The Tree’ the best of a very good bunch.
How would you define Tanya Donelly’s oeuvre, other than as delightfully idiosyncratic? Alt-rock, obvs. Maybe neo-psychedelic post-grunge shoegazey power pop. Either way, it was too good to last. After a disappointing second album, Donelly — having achieved only cult status — kind of gave up.
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