If there’s one single best thing about all the best Belly songs, it’s the way Tanya Donelly’s voice can just take off at the right moment and drag you along by the scruff of the neck, swooping upwards on the crest of the instant at which her voice seems about to crack and soars into a whoop. On “Feed The Tree”, it happens on the last word of the second occurrence of the line “I know all this and more”, and the transition into, and whole of, the chorus which follows (“take your hat off boy when you’re talking to me,/and be there when I feed the tree”) — but they’re set up by everything else around them, from the immediately urgent chords and the layers which swiftly drop in at the start through the building, surging initial stanzas. In many ways, it’s a very compact song — far from anemic, but absolutely nothing is wasted and it’s always in motion. They only put out two lps and a handful of other recordings, but Belly were a genuinely great band.
