In early 2006, Belong's October Language, the debut album by Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones of New Orleans, was discussed in the context of Hurricane Katrina. That they had recorded the album before the catastrophe didn't seem to matter; "Katrina" was the first and only thing that came to mind when you thought about New Orleans in those days, so October Language became for many a kind of response. If nothing else, the association said something about Belong's approach to shoegaze: Where Loveless and its kind tend toward the swooning, sensual, and feminine, using noise to suggest a protective womb into which one can withdraw and dream, Belong's walls of distortion were a shade darker, a few degrees colder, more isolationist. The stuff of an aftermath.
These qualities are magnified on the brief EP Colorloss Record, but something additional is brought to the table: All four of these tracks are covers, complete with vocals. For artists in Belong's sphere, the tendency when covering songs has been to pull the tune apart and reassemble it in a barely-recognizable configuration, using noise to smash the pop confection into a million glittering slivers. Belong have a different M.O. Deep down in the belly of the track, you sense that these songs are intact and functioning normally, but Belong use feedback and drone to overwhelm the tunes, to make them sound small, like something you're straining to hear and can't quite make out. Voices inside a collapsed mineshaft, maybe, or echoes from a kid stuck in a well.
That the four songs chosen are obscure psych-pop tunes adds to the effect, making the voices sound even more distant, harder to hear under an additional layer of dust. The Cleaners From Venus' early-80s take of Syd Barrett's Madcap Laughs closer "Late Night" (the version that Belong say they're referencing) is a thin, spiky new wave spin on Nuggets-era psych; Belong take the happy-sad melody and banish it to the horizon, where it can just barely be heard through the thick chords. Someone overhearing it in my vicinity likened it to Robert Pollard trapped inside a seashell, which made some sense; the Technicolor loopiness of the melody survives intact, despite sounding tiny and frail.
"Beeside", originally from Tintern Abbey, is altered most radically, the peppy melody being basically stretched like taffy to such a length that it's hard to tell where the vocals leave off and instruments begin. Because of this transformation it also sounds like the most like traditional (if well done) drone here, like it could have been made by a lot of bands. For Billy Nicholls' "Girl from New York", Belong replicate the chords with unstable, static-ridden held tones, but the vocal melody is revealed only gradually, first appearing as short, clipped notes and then hitting the full refrain about halfway in. It's pop song length (three and a half minutes) but still feels epic, as it slides uneasily through its clearly delineated sections.
"My Clown", originally by the band July, ends the set closer to where it began with the Syd Barrett tune. The plaintive "But I love my clown more than you know/ Stop fooling around" chorus sounds like it's addressed not to anyone in particular, but rather to anyone who might hear it, a message in a bottle rolling along on the heavy waves of the chords. As the track progresses-- it's the longest, stretching almost to seven minutes-- the voices become more abstracted, not-quite-lost in the din, which eventually swells into the most richly textured construction on the record. It feels important that the voice is still in there somewhere, but by this point, you feel ready to let it go, to follow the pure sound of Belong wherever it may lead.
