For indie boys of a certain age, Tanya Donelly’s absence has been a cause to mourn. The Pixies may have written the A-Z yet in the early ‘90s nobody exemplified the bubble-gum indie aesthetic quite so hauntingly and thrillingly as Donelly’s band, Belly.
Since Belly limped off stage, however, Donelly has seemed increasingly less interested in exploring indie’s by now well-worn clichés. Rather, she’s sought to reinvent herself as an understated country-rock strummer, a sort of New England cross between Laura Nyro and Gram Persons (whom she was covering even in Belly’s pomp).
The good news is that This Hungry Life, her third suite of country rockers, is, by a distance, Donelly’s most accomplished record in over a decade. On previous solo LPs Donelly has appeared too often to confuse melancholy for sloth. Here she comes out, if not quite swinging her firsts, than at least with a little fire in her eyes.
Exemplifying this new urgency is early stand-out ‘Kudalini Slide’, wherein Donelly snarls the chorus as though seized by a sudden urge to violence. Elsewhere, ‘River Girls’ could pass for a muted Belly number while ‘Days of Grace’ demonstrates that Donelly’s recent claiming of Leonard Cohen as an influence amounts to more than lip service. Not quite a return to old glories but a stirring comeback nonetheless.