This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“Life is but a dream,” Tanya Donelly delicately intones in her eternally girlish voice at the start of her new CD Beauty Sleep.
She isn’t kidding — on this second solo album, the former Throwing Muses, Belly and Breeders member row, row, rows her boat gently down a musical stream that seems to flow straight from her subconscious. Nocturnal subjects like dreams, sleepwalking, moonbeams, shadows and darkness domnate her lyrics, while the songs themselves mainly consist of soothing, singer-songwriter pop lullabyes, interrupted occasionally by jagged, nightmarish shards of alt-rock guitar and fever-dream electronics. And just to carry the whole somnambulent theme one step further, the Indian-influenced ballad Moonbeam Monkey has what surely must be one of the last recorded vocals by late Morphine singer Mark Sandman. Strange bedfellows have seldom sounded so dreamy.
