(2017) Planning for Burial - Below the House

Review: Thom Wasluck’s work as both adheres to many genre tropes, while simultaneously shirking them by combining them and moulding them together in such a way as to avoid being pigeonholed. Press releases in the lead up to his third full length, Below the House, have variously described his sound as metal, slowcore, shoegaze and seemed to have ultimately settled on the term “gloomgaze.” No matter the accuracy of these tags or not, the suggestion is that Planning for Burial’s sound is loud and cavernous, which is true, but in listening to it you would never mistake it for the work of a band; this is unmistakably the work of a sole mind. His work has always enhanced the isolation at play for Wasluck, and Below the House takes that to an even deeper level. While Below the House does not mark a huge step away from the sounds of his previous records, it does mark a step forward in terms of concept and cohesion. In the lead up to recording this album, Wasluck returned to his childhood home in freezing mountainous Pennsylvania and took up a menial day job. This daily drudgery, surrounded by cold and numbed by alcohol every evening, seeps out from the music into the album cover and title. The roiling, tumbling guitars at play throughout Below The House illustrate the rickety structures Wasluck’s mind inhabits – his house and his body – and we can feel the bones quaking right down to their foundations. Hints of the outside world come through the twinkling pianos that underscore many of the tracks, like lights on the horizon glinting in windowpanes, or the sounds of powertools whirring outside, as heard on ‘Somewhere In The Evening’.

Tracklist: 01 - Whiskey and Wine.flac 02 - Threadbare.flac 03 - Somewhere in the Evening.flac 04 - Warmth of You.flac 05 - Past Lives.flac 06 - (Something).flac 07 - Dull Knife, Pt. I.flac 08 - Dull Knife, Pt. II.flac 09 - Below the House.flac

Summary: Country: USA Genre: post-rock