Audiopile Review: Recently, discussing a reissue of Belong’s 2011 ambient-pop classic ‘Common Era’, we also teased a new LP. We called it an album-of-the-year-contender. Well, now we have ‘Realistic IX’ in stock and, while time will tell regarding the AOTY thing, it’s certainly our record of the week. New Orleans-based Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones have never quite received the critical adulation they deserve. Or, at least, their pop-leaning work has not. The more purely ambient ‘October Language’ is very well regarded. And it’s hard to see how ‘Realistic IX’, which mixes shoegaze, ambient, darkwave, and bedroom pop, could fail to win hearts in this climate. Particularly as it’s bananas good from start to finish. The fact is, experimental artists like Belong have low-key made some of the 21st-century’s finest dreampop albums. Marcus Schmickler delivered the goods with Pluramon’s ‘The Monstrous Surplus’, as did Oren Ambarchi with Sun’s ‘I’ll be the Same’. If albums like these and ‘Common Era’ failed to crossover from the experimental ghetto, it wasn’t for a lack of hooj choons. Maybe it’s cos they refused to indulge in those on-the-nose tactics that make some OG and new shoegaze mildly unsatisfying. ‘Realistic IX’ intensifies this approach by jettisoning the reverb that enveloped ‘Common Era’. But it also significantly amps up the hoojness of the choons, not to mention the energy levels. The template for this starkly lo-fi dreampop sound seems to be a My Bloody Valentine demo commonly known as ‘Kevin Song’. When said demo leaked, some non-experts wrongly declared it a fake, perhaps because it strips the MBV sound down to its core architecture. That architecture is brilliantly replicated here: metronomic drums; guitars gliding in and out of key; vocals mixed down to the point of incoherence; song structures that jump from Cro-Magnon riffing to heart-melting chord sequences. And, yes, CHOONS. This formula is repeated throughout the album’s 40 minutes (though vocals are completely dropped from some tracks). The impact wavers been tension and bliss until everything resolves with the gorgeous Gas-like ambiance of ‘AM / PM’. And that is how you make a truly satisfying shoegaze record.

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 13 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.