The psych-rockers of slugss released the wonderfully dreamy APPEAL a few years back; now, they let us under the hood with a collection of outtakes and demos from that era.
Some of the tracks included on APPEAL outtakes eventually made the final cut, while others laid dormant until now. “Belladonna” is one of the latter batch, and it’s a true demo, sounding like it could’ve been recorded on someone’s iPhone (it was actually a four-track, but you get it). The stripped-down quality belies the song’s complexity; it flows through several distinct movements, beginning with warped, distorted vocals and delicately chiming guitars that grow crunchier and pricklier as the minutes tick by, before culminating in an extended instrumental passage stuffed with alien feedback noises. The faded sound quality does the song justice–when it comes to this kind of textured guitar music, I say, the fuzzier the better.
