Why is Belly’s Star on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
A pop grunge vibe that completely works.
Some stats & info about Belly – Star
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock, Rock Music, Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Pop, Pop Music, Alternative Pop, Dream Pop, Boston Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Star released? 1993
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #826 out of 1,000
Belly’s Star on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Belly’s Star mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
Belly and Star is an album that, for both reasons I can explain and some that I simply can’t, makes me super nostalgic for the 1990s.
I’ll attempt to articulate the reasons I can explain, starting with “Feed the Tree,” a song that I heard quite a bit while I was in college in Binghamton, New York in the mid-1990s. It makes me think of MTV as a channel that (mostly) played music videos, it reminds me of coffee houses and live acoustic sets and enormous mugs of cappuccino, college students wearing winter hats inside and college girls with nose rings. The cute nose rings, non-aggressive-like. It reminds me of living in college dorms and having concerns and thoughts and interests that almost entirely (gloriously) stay within the bounds of the college and (small) city its near.
Moving onto “Feed the Tree” as song: I realized that it’s really good because it effectively co-opts some of the edge of “grunge” but puts a pretty sheen on it, almost a pop grunge vibe that completely works. And a lot of that is thanks to former-Throwing Muses member and Belly singer and guitarist Tanya Donelly.
“Every Word” has a great, melodic, grungy vibe and when I was originally writing notes about Star I jotted down, “It’s a like a less weird Breeders song (and I dig me some Breeders)?” And, oh, of course it turns out that Donelly was also in The Breeders. Totally makes sense that I dig all three bands.
The song “Angel,” by way of its title and its sound, reminds me of the character Angel, played by David Boreanaz, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, simply because Belly could have been the sort of band that would have shown up at the good old Bronze during Buffy’s early days. Anyway, the song is good.
“Low Red Moon” has an odd, dissonant quality that I’m greatly digging as it comes together as a fun, moody rocker.
Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to Belly’s Star
Also see: Throwing Muses’ The Real Ramona, #984 of best 1,000 albums ever.