01. You Think
02. Movement Two
03. (Blueberry Pop)
04. A Flowing Field Of Green
05. With Your Sunglasses On Like A Ghoul
06. Grivo
07. Twenty-Seventh Of February
08. Fresh Flowers For All Time
09. Farm Cat, Watching
The ache of passing time is one that’s looming in a quieter subtler way, at least according to Planning For Burial.
In the realm of heavy shoegaze, there’s emotional kind where the fuzz of the distorted guitar creates a droning wall of sound heavy enough to flirt with metal. Yes, you have a lot of blends of shoegaze and black metal, but the more drone/doom centric kind has a more specific kind of emotional appeal, hence why bands like The Angelic Process, Jesu and Nadja can pull such heartstring. But it’s Planning For Burial‘s label mates on The Flenser, Have A Nice Life, that have made the biggest impact on me, serving as my introduction to this specific sound. Both Have A Nice Life and Planning For Burial then occupied the same spot in the music map of my brain, not just courtesy of being part of the same label/collective, but because Below The House became a sleeper hit for me, with its seasonal lethargic depressive moods becoming something that I’ve been compelled to return to when I feel like resonating with it.
And while I’ve also returned to the previous Planning For Burial albums, especially Leaving, I feel like the fact that Below The House remained the latest Planning For Burial for so long, in a time when the world seemed to be moving so fast felt like a comfort for me. When I saw It’s Closeness, It’s Easy being announced, it took a while to fully let the knowledge of how much time has passed settle in. And it seems like that passage of time is an integral part of the album. Previous albums had some sense of urgency to them, but It’s Closeness, It’s Easy does feel like it takes its ache very slowly, with the kind of maturity that had to learn to bottle everything up.
Musically, it’s still slow heavy distorted guitars abound, but the ambient interludes take up more space. The 45 minutes runtime of It’s Closeness, It’s Easy makes it a pretty well-rounded album, like it knows exactly how much of your time to demand, but the flow of the album feels a bit uneven at times because of how the ambient side’s share of runtime doesn’t always feel as rewarding as the highlights in the more doomgaze-y moments. I’m still waiting to see which ones of them get to be songs to return to for me, but now I resonated with the gravitas in the drone-y buildup of “Twenty-Seventh of February” and the post-punk rhythms of “Fresh Flowers for All Time”. I can imagine the vocals being an obstacle for people not familiar with the band, though their earnestness should be quite obvious, especially due to how the album isn’t shy in showcasing its one-man-band nature.
Considering how much “time” is thematically tied with It’s Closeness, It’s Easy, I think it’s especially fitting to say that time will tell how much this album will grow on me.
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Written on 03.06.2025 by
Doesn’t matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out. |