(Translated from my original Italian text by Cinzia Russi)
Tanya Donelly, the twenty-six-year-old guitarist of the Throwing Muses and of the Breeders, started Belly in 1992.

Assembled with seasoned musicians of her hometown in Rhode Island, the band soon created quite a sensation with the EP Slow Dust (4AD, 1992). Dusted is the introduction to their vocal harmonies, charmingly threaded with whispers and echoes, lullabies and sighs, as well as the way they can combine them with mischievous riffs into voluptuous oriental dances. At the other end of the spectrum is the angelic ballad Dancing Gold. Another manifesto of their subtle art is Low Red Moon, a martial, psychedelic piece, which radiates a liturgical atmosphere, bathed in funereal organ and guitar chords, but at the same time wrapped in a tender melody, with Donelly aiming for Sinead O'Connor's guttural register. Slow Dog is another prodigy of their musical alchemy: the song seems to be suspended in a sort of unmelodious limbo, from where a sublime refrain suddenly springs, leading into a furious hard rock pace. Donelly, who in the past had been left in the background, is now the protagonist of these pop masterpieces, along with thirty-three-year-old bass player Gail Greenwood.

It is with the album STAR (Sire), released in 1993 and including the EP, that Donnelly can unbare her histrionic and polyedric persona- alternatively tender and aggressive, fragile and fatal - and give e free rein to her whims in a set of diverse and exhilarating songs, in harmonies which wed the exotic and the lysergic and which drown the most majestic melody in atmospheres of sheer nightmare. Angel, an Indian carnival a-la Rolling Stones' Paint It Black, is a masterpiece of this latter style; the song is sustained by a whirling rhythm and a hypnotic raga riff on which Donelly grafts her galactic trills. Her style also triumphs in the pop carillon of Gepetto, a most tender rigmarole, softly sung along a merry-go-round beat. Donelly's positive poetics dominates such juvenile jolly sarabands. The whole album is characterized by a subtle primitivism, a constant rejecting of the innovations it presents, content with its meaninglessness. Thus Someone To Die For, a sad elegy sung in a girlish tone, thus the sorcerous Witch, another composition characterized by a laconic arrangement, and the allegorical ballad Feed The Tree; but above all the sweetest lullaby Every Word. So much so that, in the end, one can no more tell whether gloomy reflections like Untogether and Stay, entirely at the mercy of anxious guitar strokes and phantasmagoric singing, are wise and conceited or childish and naive. They could be nothing but serenades that Donelly is addressing to herself, begging them to make love to her melancholy. Frail and moody, oneiric and enchanting, better than anything Throwing Muses ever did, this ethereal album launches Donelly as a mature female artist, who found out her womanhood in a rock band.

Within this introspective pop genre, Donelly is gifted with a refined musical sensibility that would become Kate Bush, even though her little songs are by no means colored by the symphonic and whimsical shades which are peculiar of the British singer.