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Donelly's new solo album, Lovesongs for Underdogs, is her first musical effort since the dissolution of Belly. Although Lovesongs has positive qualities, the album doesn't measure up to Donelly's proven potential.

Four years ago, Donelly, the co-founder of both the Throwing Muses and the Breeders, struck out on her own as the lead singer of Belly, an eerie, brilliant quartet. The band's first album, Star , though remarkable, had suprisingly marginal commercial success.

Belly's members went their separate ways after only one more album, King , which lacked altogether the continuity and inspiration found in Star .

Backed by a variety of new musicians including her bassist-husband Dean Fisher of Juliana Hatfield Three and former Pixies drummer David Lovering, Donelly has replaced the largely acoustic sound of Belly in favor of an attempt at a larger, anthemic and edgelessly conventional tone.

Her voice, while still distinctive, seems grosser, louder and less precise compared with the intricacy and subtlety of her earlier work.

Gone is the intriguing pop-grotesque of Star -- the collage of brief hallucinogenic narratives and childhood horrors.

Lovesongs is instead a series of dialogues with a distant and unsympathetic personality: "I live underwater and you live on the moon / You can't breath around me and I can't breath around you."

An album concerning emotional isolation and misunderstanding, Lovesongs contains lyrics dominated by images of submergence and surrender, of sinking and receding.

Love is thick and viscous, speaking in "The Bright Light" with "A voice so rich / Just the sound of it is forever nauseating / And I get sucked into it again."

Donelly's strength in songwriting has always been her ability to hold in tension two wildly distinct trains of thought, one musical and one lyrical. Her poetry and her melodies meander crazily, intersecting only coincidentally, teetering on the brink of complete fragmentation, but frequently succeeding in irony.

This method, which emphasizes the distance between what is said and what is heard, of what is felt and what is revealed, should be an effective approach for an album so heavily concerned with problematic communication.

At times it is quite successful, especially in the bittersweet "Mysteries of the Unexplained," which is by far the best song on the album Manna .

Unfortunately, Donelly's effort and effectiveness is uneven. Rather than sustain tension throughout the album, Donelly allows songs such as "Acrobat" and "Bum" to devolve into simple disjointedness.

While Lovesongs has moments of success, they remain isolated. By its conclusion, the album succeeds only in feeling rushed.

The songs are compartmentalized, stifling and don't accumulate toward the total effect the two final songs attempt to salvage.

Donelly still has flashes of genius, but too often her own method gets the best of her, and as she herself realizes in "Landspeed Song," what she needs is simply someone to "organize me."

This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the October 17, 1997 issue.