Planning For Burial to convey feelings of deep melancholy at Roadburn 2018
It says a lot about the kind of unique artists we love receiving at Roadburn that we often have trouble describing them in any convincing way when it’s time to do the announcements. Planning For Burial is a perfect example of this – sure, we’ll mutter a few things like doom, ambient, shoegaze and post-metal, we’ll chuckle a bit at the “gloomgaze” term that’s been used a few times.
We’ll vaguely mention the feelings of deep melancholy that not only are evoked by the band name itself, but also drip from the songs. We’ll gesticulate wildly while we try to convey the massive weight, emotional and purely musical, that these seemingly fragile compositions all carry. But after all that, we’re still a long way away from really pinpointing what a Planning For Burial record, let alone a live show, is really like.
Thom Wasluck, an American musician, singer and songwriter, is the sole lone soul behind Planning For Burial, and the project has been entrancing us since 2009, when the debut album, called Leaving, showed an already inimitable kind of sound and set the project on a path of incredible evolution. With numerous splits and other small releases along the way (including a single released on floppy disk and limited to 12 copies – we kid you not!), 2017 has witnessed the unveiling of Below The House, Planning For Burial‘s third proper full-length.
It is possibly the project’s most lapidary record so far, but also the most tremendously enveloping emotional tour-de-force it has achieved. Thom performs alone on stage, with a guitar, a keyboard and a surrounding crowd of effects pedals as his only friends up there, and somehow that lonely figure is a very appropriate sight, entirely coherent with the fathomless oceans of desolation cascading from the instruments and from Thom‘s voice.
Hold on to your hearts, because they might break; Planning For Burial takes to the stage at Roadburn 2018 on Friday 20 April.
José Carlos Santos / November 2017
