Leaving

Oh yes, I've been waiting to talk about this record proper for a while. Planning for Burial has finally gotten a proper release for the full-length Leaving, which has been in the making for quite some time, apparently. And does it ever show.

Leaving first dropped, to my knowledge, towards the end of 2009 with a fairly quiet online release that didn't get to nearly enough people but nonetheless blew the minds of pretty much everyone who heard it (myself included, natch). Among those people was Dan Barrett, one half of Have a Nice Life and owner of Enemies List Home Recordings (HANL, Nahvalr, American Addio, Afterlives, etc.). So rather than a modest online release and quiet home-pressing, Leaving got the EL Treatment, meaning: a) super-enthusiastic label support, and b) super-fantastic packaging. Seriously, if nothing else, this is a strong case for why you buy your goddamn music: hand-numbered, hand-assembled, stark but beautifully presented.



And yet there isn't nothing else, there's so much else, much more than this clumsy segue would have you believe. Hyperdespressive doomgaze, heavy in all the right places and impenetrable atmosphere throughout. It occupies much of the same ideological space of its labelmates, which is not to say it sounds like Have a Nice Life, but it's similarly fashioned faux-black metal aesthetics with doomy rumblings and shoegaze density (can I go ahead and coin "doomgaze" as a genre already? It sounds right. It feels right.) Really the whole thing is stellar throughout, but if you need to be convinced in the next five minutes that you need to own this, go ahead and check out "Memories You'll Never Feel Again", which is probably the heaviest waltz I've heard in a while. Heavy, heavy guitar work, enthralling piano banging, soaring melodies on top of it all before it collapses under its own weight into listless groaning and xylophone. Killer, killer stuff.

Planning for Burial - Memories You'll Never Feel Again

Buy it now while you still can.

This used to be a free release, but it doesn't seem to be now that it's gotten an official release, so I'm going to respect that (oh shut up) and point you towards this preview track and some Planning for Burial b-sides.

Please buy this, though. Really. Both the artist and the label deserve your support fully.

Next up: New stuff from Silber Media, who have also done a lot to get a bit of your hard-earned money.