Band: Belong
Album: Common Era
Label: Kranky
Year: 2011
Tracklist
01. Come See
02. Never Came Close
03. A Walk
04. Perfect Life
05. Keep Still
06. Different Heart
07. Make Me Return
08. Common Era
09. Very Careful
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Belong's 2006 debut, October Language, processed guitars into clouds of edgeless texture and tone. The Colorless Record EP from 2008 reorganized those huge, crumbling drone-chords on a spindle of obscure psych-pop covers, making the sound less abstract while remaining a glorious ruin. With Common Era, the new album from the New Orleans duo of Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones, an evolutionary timeline emerges.
The band's development began in the primordial muck on October, leapfrogged to the 1960s with Colorless, and now lands with one foot in the krautrock of the 1970s and the other in the shoegaze/post-punk of the 1980s. (Let's hope that next, they pass over their grunge record and skip right to dubstep.) This is Belong's least mysterious album by far, with a greater emphasis on vocals, perceptibly changing chords, and rock rhythms. They used to sound like Tim Hecker having a dream about JAMC, My Bloody Valentine, or even Joy Division. Now they evoke such acts much more directly, as well as the distantly thundering drums of Can at their most elemental. Those drums especially temper Belong's sublime omnipresence, and their music comes to sound flattened here.
Belong often do a great job of separating these key influences from their unique style, but it feels like too much of a genre exercise to maintain album-length interest. Opener "Come See" is a tour de force of reconstituted krautrock: A gale of melody-drenched distortion and interference twists around a sinewy bass and drum figure. Sustained chords fall through one another to the sound of rending metal. Elongated vocals pull back against the pulse, and it's all capped by a stuttering feedback solo. The song is so comprehensive in its homage and mighty in its execution that it renders the rest of the album somewhat redundant, as Belong continue to mine the same vein with diminishing returns.
The dark synth-pop mood of "Never Came Close" should make for a change of pace, but Belong's murkiness obscures songwriterly differences, emphasizing instead a sameness of surface: muffled voices and broad strokes of glittering melody. The song's endlessly echoing snare also illustrates how limp their version of the motorik pulse can feel; it actually drains tension from the music. It's not that there isn't cool stuff here after the first track-- the curling bass line and stately progression of "A Walk" make it sound favorably like a chillwave M83, and its opening flourish is especially neat. But "neat" is where Common Era seems to stop. Most of the songs are solid, with the possible exception of the slackened "Keep Still", but none after the first has much capacity to surprise us or deepen the palette. -pitchfork.com
Official Site
Myspace
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The band's development began in the primordial muck on October, leapfrogged to the 1960s with Colorless, and now lands with one foot in the krautrock of the 1970s and the other in the shoegaze/post-punk of the 1980s. (Let's hope that next, they pass over their grunge record and skip right to dubstep.) This is Belong's least mysterious album by far, with a greater emphasis on vocals, perceptibly changing chords, and rock rhythms. They used to sound like Tim Hecker having a dream about JAMC, My Bloody Valentine, or even Joy Division. Now they evoke such acts much more directly, as well as the distantly thundering drums of Can at their most elemental. Those drums especially temper Belong's sublime omnipresence, and their music comes to sound flattened here.
Belong often do a great job of separating these key influences from their unique style, but it feels like too much of a genre exercise to maintain album-length interest. Opener "Come See" is a tour de force of reconstituted krautrock: A gale of melody-drenched distortion and interference twists around a sinewy bass and drum figure. Sustained chords fall through one another to the sound of rending metal. Elongated vocals pull back against the pulse, and it's all capped by a stuttering feedback solo. The song is so comprehensive in its homage and mighty in its execution that it renders the rest of the album somewhat redundant, as Belong continue to mine the same vein with diminishing returns.
The dark synth-pop mood of "Never Came Close" should make for a change of pace, but Belong's murkiness obscures songwriterly differences, emphasizing instead a sameness of surface: muffled voices and broad strokes of glittering melody. The song's endlessly echoing snare also illustrates how limp their version of the motorik pulse can feel; it actually drains tension from the music. It's not that there isn't cool stuff here after the first track-- the curling bass line and stately progression of "A Walk" make it sound favorably like a chillwave M83, and its opening flourish is especially neat. But "neat" is where Common Era seems to stop. Most of the songs are solid, with the possible exception of the slackened "Keep Still", but none after the first has much capacity to surprise us or deepen the palette. -pitchfork.com
Official Site
Myspace
Buy
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![Album Cover](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3908647420_10.jpg")
![Album Cover](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0968664813_10.jpg")
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