Belong, "Colorloss Record"
It would be fine by me if Belong were to repeat the lush distortion of their debut October Language forever. Instead, on Colorloss Record they turn down the bass a little and add lots of vocals that they process just shy of oblivion. All of which creates a feeling similar to listening to A Hard Day’s Night through your teeth.
This four track vinyl-to-digital EP captures the spirit of a tape that has been sitting in the attic for 18 years and has lost a large proportion of its fidelity. Yet these shimmering pieces have the mixture of euphoria and disintegration just right. Some people may hear only echoing noise but others will enjoy a crush-like chemical reaction. Belong lift us up (to) where we love. They create an atmosphere of iridescent, woozy rapture as guitar, synth, and mellotron are chamfered beyond belief and joined with analog effects. The EP evokes a lonely imaginary world; a current reference might be the protagonist living with locked-in syndrome in the film The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.
All four songs inhabit a bizarre space between Tim Hecker, The Floaters, Hawkwind, and Songs of the Humpback Whale. Belong's waves of sound ebb and flow until it becomes difficult to gauge whether the music is fast or slow. The shifting, decomposing, pulse rhythms and hypnotic wash of sound encourage a loss of bearings or a flip of perception. The effect can be like leading a race only to discover that the other runners have turned around and you are now last, or noticing that the picture of the vase is also two people facing each other. It took several listens for me to notice the section during "Beeside" when pretty much everything but the voice cuts away. This moment does not match the shocking realization that at some point in the newer version of Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet the tramp's voice disappears, but in a small way it is pretty effective.
Colorloss Record has the distortion and haunted prettiness of October Language but the new tweaks bode well for Belong's full-length release coming later this year. Incidentally, DJ Fleamarket (curator and High Priest of the Deep South Museum & Church of Sacred Vinyl) informs me that the vocals to "My Clown" and "Beeside" originated on 45s from the English psychedlic groups July and Tintern Abbey, and he's usually correct. Meanwhile, Belong originate from New Orleans and some of us still regret that they were not invited to do the half-time show when the New Orleans Saints played their first post-flood home game in 2006. The NFL and the Bush administration missed a great opportunity. Instead of some washed-up bores drowning out token local brass band artists, Belong might have played "I Never Lose Never Really," and that fucker could have beamed a subliminal message across the globe: something about the abstract nature of freedom, beauty and decay, or the reaffirmation of the imperative to sculpt sonic effigies of the ghost of Brian Wilson and eat great seafood.
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