Belong - Common Era

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5...according to our Phil on Thu 28 Apr, 2011.

Oh my god. I've been waiting years for this to come out. It's only 5 years since their breathtaking debut which is still being regularly played at home though it feels like an eternity. One thing you know for sure is that when a band makes an album that good and doesn't do another one for 5 years then it's gonna be good. In this day and age of folks releasing loads, making everything available and being far too prolific for their own good it's great when you get an artist like this who takes their time to breed a classic. The opener reminds me of something off the Fluorescent Grey EP by Deerhunter. Shoegazey fuzzy pop with a metronomic beat and breathy vocals. I love the fuzz....and it's contained throughout the album. From start to end there's a general shoegazey fuzzy feel. Plenty of pop tunes in there amidst the feedback and that is what separates it from the 1st album. You get pop songs with vocals. Melodies are buried deep within layers of feedback. The songs are brilliantly constructed and on first listen I was getting the goosebumpy thing halfway through a song. I rarely get that on first listen of anything. If you're after a contemporary reference point then if you liked The Soft Moon album you'll more than likely dig this. Gothy dreamy pop with a drum machine and more fuzz than you could shake a shitty stick at. Fucking genius.

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It's been five years since the last Belong long player, as the duo
works slowly to organise their sound works. Both the time
invested, and the wait, have been well rewarded with this return.

Common Era shows extraordinary progression from that first
album of dense, scorched earth instrumentals, hints of a new
direction having been revealed on the Colorless Record EP from
2008 which contained covers of four should-have-been classics
from the original psychedelic era.

The new material has such common pop elements as “songs”,
vocals and drum machines, but the results could hardly be called
conventional and are like little else happening on the current
“scene”.

The songs themselves are akin to radio transmissions received
from another time and place, just as likely to be the future as the
past, or even from a contemporary alternate universe. They are
both passionate and dispassionate, grey yet technicolor, ghostly
and palpable, distant yet immediate, grainy and focused. Upon
listening these conceptual contradictions are dismissed with
ease, as the recordings reveal that they fit all of these descriptors
simultaneously, an extraordinary balancing act.