Belong's music has gradually evolved over two decades of sporadic activity, moving from their abstract drone beginnings to something resembling actual rock songs. At times, change seems to have crept up on them. Speaking to an interviewer about the release of their second full-length, 2011's gothic, sprawling Common Erathe New Orleans duo expressed a hint of confusion about how the album was coming out. “People mentioned a lot of shoegaze in relation to the new album and that surprised us,” said Turk Dietrich, adding, “We don't feel any connection aesthetically, harmonically or sonically, to most of the artists from the shoegaze movement of the early decades '90”.
If Deitrich and his partner Mike Jones once struggled to hear the shoegaze influence in their music, 13 years later, they seem to have come up with the idea. The duo's third album, Realistic IXhe doesn't necessarily sound influenced by the shoegaze movement as a whole. sounds mostly inspired by the shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine – specifically their landmark 1991 album; Without love. Hit play on the album's opening track, “Realistic (I'm Still Waiting),” and it's all there right from the jump: the fuzzy, smeared guitar riffs. the androgynous angel sighs; that general sense of warp and weft, as if the track itself were bending from the shape of a giant tremolo arm.
Living rent-free in another band's soundscape is rarely a good look—especially when it's as special as what Kevin Shields has created. But Dietrich and Jones are expert sound sculptors, with an instinctive grasp of textural layers and feedback modulation. And while much of today's shoegaze revivalists approach the sound in a somewhat basic way – a bit of fuzz on the guitars, control; vague sensation of irritation in the vocal cords, control-on Realistic IXBelong have locked in better than most to the alien side of My Bloody Valentine: that steamy, synthetic quality that made Without love you feel detached from familiar tests of rock'n'roll and drift in the direction of a new one.
Thankfully, Belong is smart enough not to recreate My Bloody Valentine's masterpiece beat by beat. Dietrich and Jones approach the Without love formula with intention, like detectives reopening a cold case and sifting through the evidence in search of a new way forward. Where Without love The live drums—though sampled and extensively reassembled by Shields—belong to drum machines, giving their beats a blockier, more mechanized feel. And while Without loveThe lyrics are notoriously difficult to decipher, Realistic IX takes the spirit of obfuscation even further. “Souvenir” and “Jealousy” follow a familiar verse-chorus progression, but the murky vocals are completely unintelligible, used solely for their sound and feel. Indeed, you get the sense that Dietrich and Jones remain drone to the core, seeking moments of surface not in the material of the songwriting but in the careful handling of texture and tone.
