BELONG - Realistic IX LP

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 thirteen 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.

"If Deitrich and his bandmate Mike Jones once struggled to hear the influence of shoegaze on their music, 13 years later, they seem to have come around to the idea. The duo’s third album, Realistic IX, doesn’t necessarily sound influenced by the shoegaze movement as a whole; it sounds inspired principally by the shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine—specifically their landmark 1991 album Loveless. Hit play on the album’s opening track, “Realistic (I’m Still Waiting),” and it’s all there right from the jump: the gauzy, smudged guitar riffs; the androgynous angel sighs; that general sense of warp and weft, as if the track itself was being bent out of shape by a gigantic tremolo arm." - Pitchfork