Phases and Stages

Tanya Donelly

Whiskey Tango Ghosts (4AD/Beggars) The former Belly frontwoman's third solo effort opens with a curious admission, lovely and mat-ter-of-fact over a rainy-day piano line that lingers for the remainder of Whiskey Tango Ghosts. "I've lost something on the way," coos Donelly. "And I can't explain." She doesn't have to. It happens to the best of us. These are love songs, presumably to her husband, Dean Fisher, who, as on past Donelly releases, plays guitar, bass, and drums, and to her 4-year-old daughter, and they represent a different kind of restlessness than that of her best work. Where Donelly once attacked her ghosts head-on, almost getting off on it, she now lies in wait, favoring the family life instead of any artful fight. The apprehension serves her songwriting only to a certain point, and most of Whiskey Tango Ghosts suffers from a kind of confessional sluggishness. Donelly's voice remains an adventure in itself, going from country-girlish to sirenlike and seriously disturbing in a beat, but her words and melodies here are little match for it. The album is hardly a complete disappointment, though. The title track and "Just in Case You Quit Me," which follows it, are Gram Parsons-type sneak attacks, darkly sweet and dangerous: "Well, I know we're dug in deep here. Why can't we live high with the wind?" wonders Donelly on the former. Then, following a haunting pedal-steel break: "You're just a freckle away from changing everything." Is that a promise or a threat?