Belong – Realistic IX (2024) [FLAC 24bit/96kHz]

Belong – Realistic IX (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 37:06 minutes | 779 MB | Genre: Experimental, Electronic, Shoegaze
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © kranky

Realistic IX, the third full-length by the duo of Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich aka Belong, is both an expansion and excavation of their signature acid-washed songcraft. Bleached guitars, metronomic drums, and buried voices rev, swirl, and seethe across shifting gradients of haze and hypnosis, alternately driving and diffuse. Melodies surge closer to the surface, flexing their form before resubmerging into quickening currents of feedback. Elsewhere the elements dissipate into a dusk of murk and microtonalities, electricity liberated back into infinite night.Although it’s been 13 years since Belong’s prior Kranky offering, Common Era, none of the duo’s rare synergy has decayed in the interim. Jones and Dietrich’s commitment to oblique states of motorik drone and liminal emotion continues to evolve and unfold, increasingly tactile and unreal, an alluring glow glimpsed through fogged windows at witching hours.

“Over a decade since their last album, Belong return to Kranky with a cloud of compressed, overdriven guitar and tinny drum machine loops contrasted with passages of smudged ambience, somewhere between MBV, JAMC and Vladislav Delay’s vaporous dubs.

When Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich released ‘October Language’ way back in 2006, their careful fusion of shoegaze and digitally-swallowed ambience felt necessary. It was a reaction of sorts not just to Christian Fennesz’s digitally enhanced walls of guitar noise, but the wider world’s re-appraisal of shoegaze, a genre that had appeared only briefly before mainstream critics diverted their attentions to Britpop. In the early ’00s, the tide seemed to shift when shoegaze’s quiet legion of bedroom listeners came of age and inserted its euphoric bombast into new templates, and Belong were inarguably at the forefront of that generation. 2013’s ‘Common Era’ was a surprise, an attempt to harness the awestruck pop of day-zero shoegaze (think MBV and The Durutti Column) without losing the experimental momentum of ‘October Language’, and ‘Realistic IX’ propels us even further into the grain and grit, crossbreeding tape-warped ‘Loveless’-pilled songcraft with hallucinogenic, cacophonous dub techno.

Opening jam ‘Realistic’ sets the scene, curling breathy vocals through a bricked-up sonic alcove of compressed, overdriven guitar chords and tinny drum machine loops. The record begins to mutate as it stretches out, drawing parallels between shoegaze and aggy, shadowy post-punk (‘Realistic (I’m Still Waiting)’ before tipping into sputtering, Chain Reaction-esque dub techno on ‘Crucial Years’. The key here is the continuity; Belong never completely trade one sound for another. The crashing, crunch-fried guitars are still there, just split into granules and clouded over rolling kicks and frayed percussion.

Unsurprisingly, it’s when these elements collide most conspicuously that the album jerks into full speed. ‘Bleach’ is like a blurred fantasy with two tapes playing alongside each other: the unmistakable melodies and gravelly distortion of Jesus and Mary Chain with psychedelic, scurrying electronic rhythms that carry the weight of Deitrich’s fractal Second Woman project. ‘Image of Love’ is even more assertive, a radio-friendly swooner that’s dragged out of the late ’80s pedalboard phase with its nervy electroid ticks and a clever use of sidechain . At their core, Belong still make luscious ambient music, crammed with all the harmonic bliss that made ‘October Language’ so vital, but they’re careful to repeat themselves – ‘Realistic IX’ wonders what those textures might do to revitalize full blown pop songs.

And if you’re here for the dub, they hold back the best for last with ‘AM/PM’, a cavernous 4/4 belter that’s worth the price tag alone. Optimistic and exuberant gear – absolutely essential listening if yr into JAMC, Ride, Bowery Electric, Curve, Seefeel, Flying Saucer Attack et al.”

Tracklist:

1-01. Belong – Realistic (I’m Still Waiting) (04:48)
1-02. Belong – Difficult Boy (02:31)
1-03. Belong – Crucial Years (02:55)
1-04. Belong – Souvenir (03:56)
1-05. Belong – Image of Love (04:38)
1-06. Belong – Bleach (06:04)
1-07. Belong – Jealousy (04:29)
1-08. Belong – AM / PM (07:44)

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