Belong’s music has evolved gradually across two decades of sporadic activity, moving from their abstract drone beginnings toward something resembling actual rock songs. At times, the change seems to have crept up on them. Speaking with an interviewer around the release of their second full-length, 2011’s gothic, expansive Common Era, the New Orleans duo expressed a note of bafflement about the way the album was landing. “People have been citing shoegaze a lot in reference to the new album and that actually took us a bit by surprise,” said Turk Dietrich, adding, “We don’t feel any relation in aesthetic, harmonically or sonically, to most of the artists from the early ’90s shoegaze movement.”
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.
Living rent-free in another group’s soundworld is seldom a good look—particularly when it’s as distinctive as the one Kevin Shields created. But Dietrich and Jones are seasoned sculptors of sound, with an instinctive grasp of layering textures and shaping feedback. And whereas much of the current crop of shoegaze revivalists approach the sound in a somewhat basic way—bit of fuzz on the guitars, check; vague sense of ennui in the vocals, check—on Realistic IX, Belong have locked on better than most to My Bloody Valentine’s alien side: that vaporous, synthetic quality that made Loveless feel untethered from familiar rock’n’roll touchstones and adrift in the direction of something new.
Luckily, Belong are canny enough not to recreate My Bloody Valentine’s masterwork stroke by stroke. Dietrich and Jones approach the Loveless formula with intent, like detectives reopening a cold case and sifting the evidence in search of a new way forward. Where Loveless featured live drums—albeit sampled and extensively reassembled by Shields—Belong make use of drum machines, giving their rhythms a blockier, more mechanistic feel. And while Loveless’ lyrics are famously hard to parse, Realistic IX takes the spirit of obfuscation further still. “Souvenir” and “Jealousy” follow a familiar verse-chorus progression, but the blurred-out vocals are wholly unintelligible, deployed purely for their sound and feel. Indeed, you get the sense that Dietrich and Jones remain drone to the bone, seeking moments of epiphany not in the stuff of songcraft but in the careful manipulation of texture and tone.