Realistic IX: Vinyl LP

Label: Kranky
Release Date: 9th August

Belong are back from the early 00s shoegaze renaissance to join the early-mid 20s shoegaze renaissance. However, it's not like they're aping the forefathers of the movement their take on the washed-out, reverb and bliss sound of guitars swirling has the ability to sound like a recollection of a dream that's been printed on an old fanzine and washed in acid.

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 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.