Planning For Burial : It’s Closeness, It’s Easy
An ebbing and flowing of burning intensity sits at the heart of Thom Wasluck’s colossal guitar project Planning for Burial. Eight years have passed since his previous album, Below the House, a transitional breakthrough that reached a wider audience than any of his prior work—a substantial feat given his twenty-year oeuvre. It’s easy to ascribe Wasluck’s output to genres that embody melancholia and lethargy, such as slowcore and blackgaze. Yet his music remains distinct for its duality: tumultuous guitar barrages gracefully melt into oneiric ambience. Committed to sound is the entire spectrum of fervent anger, even down to the wistful, solitudinous wallowing after an outburst—It’s Closeness, It’s Easy furthers Wasluck’s captivating vision.
The throbbing drums and thundering chords of opener “You Think” hit give no indication that Wasluck ever kept dormant. The calamitous atmosphere makes this opener his most immediate and intense, as his screeching voice pierces through the enveloping feedback as if to escape from drowning. Although audibly overwhelming, faint acoustic noodling can be parsed amid the vortexing noise—Wasluck’s knack for dynamic production is key to his emotive acuity.
Then, “You Think” seamlessly segues into “Movement Two,” where coiling guitars softly leave the listener adrift, like comparable to the tender “My Machine” from Boris’ masterpiece Pink. This is the exhausted cooling-down after an eruptive episode. The escalating intensity has come to a screeching halt, and the reverb cushioning the fall, imploring the listener to recover from the distraught feeling, difficult as it may be. The resignation to negative feelings is devastating, but Wasluck’s soundscaping profoundly decorates it with a haunting warmth. Unlike most blackgaze, where dreaminess and nostalgia are at the fore, Planning for Burial is indeed more like slowcore: a body of work full of material like Duster’s “Echo, Bravo”—turbulent catharsis like rocketing vapour trails, and the subsequent crash landings. “(blueberry pop)” is another beautiful segue that prolongs this dread, laced with poignant strings.
Towering, noisy guitar riffs dominate the latter half of It’s Closeness, It’s Easy, some playing out like a march (“A Flowing Field of Green”), others like a twisted, twinkly lullaby (“With Your Sunglasses on Like a Ghoul”). The most compelling moment is the sparse closer “Farm Cat, Watching.” While truncated from its full nine minutes, this meditative and hallucinatory ambience still succeeds in sounding like a bottomless pit. Its changelessness is pure stillness in musical form, consoling the listener from the preceding outrage and even the world’s volatile state.
In short, Wasluck continues from where he left off in 2017, but so much has occurred since. Be it time evaporating or the state of the world gradually growing more dire, reckoning with that ongoing grueling chaos permeates It’s Closeness, It’s Easy. Look at its artwork: two chairs lie flipped over on an empty grass field, beneath a smoggy sky. That picture can mean a thousand things—here, it’s that Wasluck’s latest sonic extremes work as another remedy for that disarray.
Label: Flenser
Year: 2025
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