Planning for Burial - (UntitledEP) [doomgaze, black metal, post-rock]
It's a bit unnerving when one single band - or, for that matter, one single musician - can so deftly capture and combine all my favourite things about music at once. Planning For Burial has done that twice already in two decidedly different ways: once with the sprawling, heart-wrenching filthy post-gaze (whatever) Leaving and then again on the, relatively-speaking, clean-cut slowcore on the split with Lonesummer. The new single here - originally intended as a 7" which sadly never came into fruition - is self-described as a meeting of these sounds, but more than that, it's a perfection two. Opener "I Hope You Will Pick Me Out" is even more grim, ferocious and blissed out all at once than anything on Leaving, and "Annick" was basically born to break hearts, sounding like an even more low-key Low with guitar solos ripped straight from late-era Talk Talk (yeah, I know, right, could things get better?). This is probably going to start slipping into slack-jawed fanboyism (if it hasn't already), but really, check it out. No one is forging sounds as sublimely as this.
Download/stream/buy. (Physical CD limited to 60 copies w/ exclusive extra-long alternate take of Leaving's soul-crushing eponymous closer.)
If you're anything like me - and I daresay any casual readers here are - then genre-blending (done correctly) is something that probably tickles you in a way. Mount Eerie's Wind's Poem, for instance, was my favourite album last year thanks in no small part to its sublime and entirely natural fusion of black metal and Elverum's trademark timid folk. Now if we could just get John Darnielle to drop a hyperliterate death metal opus, we can officially be done with music. But until then, I guess, the search goes on.
Planning For Burialshould be familiar as the project that released one of my other favourites from last year, Leaving, which melted together some of my favourite things in the world (post-rock, shoegaze, doom, black metal) into a lurching beast of a record. He's back, with no-fi necromancer Lonesummer, who plays bedroom black metal with a big helping of sad on top, and together they've put out a fucking downer of a record which, of course, I implore you to buy.
The Lonesummer half is possibly my favourite Lonesummer material to date, opening with the absolutely punishing )ironic old-timey radio samples aside) "Joy is a Burden" and sort of pulls off a black metal/noise fusion that I really thought Wold were going to do after all this "herp derp My Bloody Valentine meets black metal" bullshit I read but no no no this is much better, don't let the Wold comparison scare you off; this is what I wish Wold were like. Elsewhere, "I Wish I Could Delete Last Night" is the poppiest black metal track this year and will make a really neat song for your Myspace profile. And yeah, "Your Eyes Always Shake Me" is nothing like either of those either - essentially the ballad of his batch - and yeah, yeah, and yeah. This is black metal loves black metal as much as it loves telling it to go fuck itself.
The flip side is the first new Planning for Burial material in too long and dials back the kitchen sink approach of Leaving into a more focused set of tracks, which is refreshing because it really makes this EP feel separate from the rest of his canon so far, as an EP should. Glacially paced, morbid and brooding and dense fog music that downplays the (comparative) bombast of the full-length. "Sleeping in Separate Rooms" is an entirely gorgeous daydream, all blurred and half-speed, and "If I Knew What to Say" eventually collects itself into a surreal, lush synth-heavy slowcore rumination.
Also worth mentioning is that Thom - Mr. Burial himself - put this split out on his Music Ruins Lives label, which is ideologically my best friend-turned-record company and has already put out a few really worthwhile releases (including a Have a Nice Life cassette and a full-length by blackened genre-mockers Airs), so pay attention and don't miss anything.
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.
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.
It's a bit unnerving when one single band - or, for that matter, one single musician - can so deftly capture and combine all my favourite things about music at once. Planning For Burial has done that twice already in two decidedly different ways: once with the sprawling, heart-wrenching filthy post-gaze (whatever) Leaving and then again on the, relatively-speaking, clean-cut slowcore on the split with Lonesummer. The new single here - originally intended as a 7" which sadly never came into fruition - is self-described as a meeting of these sounds, but more than that, it's a perfection two. Opener "I Hope You Will Pick Me Out" is even more grim, ferocious and blissed out all at once than anything on Leaving, and "Annick" was basically born to break hearts, sounding like an even more low-key Low with guitar solos ripped straight from late-era Talk Talk (yeah, I know, right, could things get better?). This is probably going to start slipping into slack-jawed fanboyism (if it hasn't already), but really, check it out. No one is forging sounds as sublimely as this.
