Belong’s music has developed steadily throughout 20 years of sporadic exercise, transferring from their summary drone beginnings towards one thing resembling precise rock songs. At instances, the change appears to have crept up on them. Talking with an interviewer across the launch of their second full-length, 2011’s gothic, expansive Widespread Period, the New Orleans duo expressed a word of bafflement about the way in which the album was touchdown. “Folks have been citing shoegaze so much in reference to the brand new album and that truly took us a bit without warning,” stated Turk Dietrich, including, “We don’t really feel any relation in aesthetic, harmonically or sonically, to a lot of the artists from the early ’90s shoegaze motion.”
If Deitrich and his bandmate Mike Jones as soon as struggled to listen to the affect of shoegaze on their music, 13 years later, they appear to have come round to the thought. The duo’s third album, Practical IX, doesn’t essentially sound influenced by the shoegaze motion as a complete; it sounds impressed principally by the shoegaze band, My Bloody Valentine—particularly their landmark 1991 album Loveless. Hit play on the album’s opening monitor, “Practical (I’m Nonetheless Ready),” and it’s all there proper from the leap: the gauzy, smudged guitar riffs; the androgynous angel sighs; that normal sense of warp and weft, as if the monitor itself was being bent out of form by a big tremolo arm.
Residing rent-free in one other group’s soundworld is seldom a great look—significantly when it’s as distinctive because the one Kevin Shields created. However Dietrich and Jones are seasoned sculptors of sound, with an instinctive grasp of layering textures and shaping suggestions. And whereas a lot of the present crop of shoegaze revivalists strategy the sound in a considerably primary approach—little bit of fuzz on the guitars, verify; imprecise sense of ennui within the vocals, verify—on Practical IX, Belong have locked on higher than most to My Bloody Valentine’s alien facet: that vaporous, artificial high quality that made Loveless really feel untethered from acquainted rock’n’roll touchstones and adrift within the course of one thing new.
Fortunately, Belong are canny sufficient to not recreate My Bloody Valentine’s masterwork stroke by stroke. Dietrich and Jones strategy the Loveless formulation with intent, like detectives reopening a chilly case and sifting the proof seeking a brand new approach ahead. The place Loveless featured stay drums—albeit sampled and extensively reassembled by Shields—Belong make use of drum machines, giving their rhythms a blockier, extra mechanistic really feel. And whereas Loveless’ lyrics are famously exhausting to parse, Practical IX takes the spirit of obfuscation additional nonetheless. “Memento” and “Jealousy” comply with a well-known verse-chorus development, however the blurred-out vocals are wholly unintelligible, deployed purely for his or her sound and really feel. Certainly, you get the sense that Dietrich and Jones stay drone to the bone, searching for moments of epiphany not within the stuff of songcraft however within the cautious manipulation of texture and tone.
