Belong : Realistic IX
Belong is an underrated group. Initially having been around just long enough to put out two EPs and two LPs, including the phenomenal Common Era, they seemed to flicker like embers in a dying cathode ray TV, some cellophane ghost escaping in powdered silver nitrate. Their sound was on the noisy end of shoegaze and dream pop, calling to mind groups like Astrobrite and loveliescrushing, taking the sonic experimentalism of Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine and applying the same gothic sense of haze and decay we might associate with William Basinski, This Mortal Coil or the like. That final album of theirs, Common Era, has been a mainstay of mine since its release, hovering like a ghost, scoring the process of finishing writing a novel that was more like an exorcism and some periods of intense inward turmoil that made me feel like I was boiling alive. Then, they disappeared.
So when I saw 15 years later they were back I actually, no shit, cried. It felt for me similar to the return of Duster from their long slumber and, similar to that esteemed group’s return, Belong’s new record feels like a fitting continuation of their legacy, neither slavishly adoring of their own previous successes nor so radical a shift that you wonder the wisdom in sharing the name. The most shocking shift present on this record is the sudden presence of, gasp, songs?! That’s right; despite their earlier material positioning them as stalwarts on the bleeding experimental edge of the fusion of noise, dream pop, ethereal wave and even glints of internet-savvy micro-genres such as witch house and the like, all forms that typically evade the easy categorical of songs, this new set, at least initially, has clearly structured work that wouldn’t feel out of place on a modern My Bloody Valentine record.
It forms a strange complaint, especially given that much more esteemed group’s prolonged silence despite teases of activity, Belong’s own long slumber and, to be frank, the incredible strength of this material. Originality is overrated anyway; genre workouts are amenable to anyone with open ears and an open heart so long as the art compels, and this does handily. That said, it is a great relief when, as the tracks ease on, you are overcome by waves of roaring noise, amorphous clouds of rattling hiss, lapped at by the waters. In a certain sense, it’s hard not to still yearn for the proper songs on the LP to be covered in a bit more affected grime, but this is fantasy football, not criticism. The structure of the album still allows that always intriguing sense of disintegration, material pockmarked by burned holes in the tape, with it fraying into wild noise and the shapelessness of the malevolent sea by the end.
The key aspect they have maintained, after all, is that image-rich substrate that motivates this kind of music. Rhythms punch and hiccup and scrape in a very tactile way; the uses of noise and synth pads and layered sound feel like how dissociation feels, struggling to remain yourself inside yourself (through the drugs, through the anxiety, through the depression, through the deathward tug of sleep). The thing that made their early work so powerful, that intense and immediated sense of imprinting a whole interior world on their abstract soundscaping, is still preserved here. There is a subset of the world and its listeners who treat material like this as the Bible, not because of some abstract critical greatness but because of how in its sinews one can see, like a strained and striated mirror, clear reflections of some interior self. It’s the same thing that makes The Cure at their best not just the best goth rock band of all time but one of the best bands, period, this mystical sense of depth, like stepping into a puddle that takes you to some undreamable drowning world.
Label: Kranky
Year: 2024
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