Planes Mistaken For Stars – Do You Still Love Me?
Planes Mistaken For Stars are done when they say they’re done. It’s easy to forget that the Denver-based band, originally formed in Peoria, Illinois, ever broke up. They just couldn’t stay away after their career skidded to a halt following 2006’s Mercy, reuniting two years later, reissuing their then-final record and soundtracking the tumultuous days of late 2016 with Prey, back like they’d never left. This was supposed to be their glorious second act—removed from the days when they’d emerged kicking and screaming onto a scene which would embrace them in the wake of 1998’s totemic self-titled debut EP—and indeed, they’d found a way forward; but things would never be the same again. Band leader Gared O’Donnell was diagnosed with esophageal cancer the same year plans for their fifth album were put on ice. Sadly, he wouldn’t live to see its completion, passing away toward the end of 2021.
Things get rawer still: Do You Still Love Me? opens with “Matthew is Dead,” a tribute to former guitarist Matt Bellinger, who left the band in 2006 and died by suicide in 2017. It’s a breathlessly intense song that finds the band tackling past and impending grief head-on. Every single one of these thirteen songs is shot through with the spirit of a quartet who have always made every record as though it would be their last. For O’Donnell, who sang like a man with a mouth full of broken glass until the end, it was. References to finality and endings are scattered throughout the record, and they cut like a knife within the weighty context of the record’s creation (“When I slide from this stool, you’ll never see me again / One last drink, shall we begin?”) with the likes of “Fix Me” and “Arrow” burning brilliantly in the vein of some of the band’s best work.
Planes have never sounded this widescreen: ambition drips from every measure of the record, with the album’s twin title tracks held up as an example; two radically different versions of the same song—brash agitation juxtaposed with perhaps the lushest song they’ve ever written. It’s an album of extremes, pushed to a distressing limit in the closing moments of mid-album epic “Punch the Gauge,” with shattering glass and guttural, pained screams offering insight to the darkness surrounding the music’s creation; yet there is also beauty and transcendence to be found throughout, with “Run Rabbit Run” and the truly gripping “Put Your Heart on the Fire” offering accessible entry points to those who may feel like the record presents itself as something bleak and difficult. Don’t get me wrong—this is a tough listen even at its most welcoming, but goddamn is it beautiful to hear this band leaving it all on the studio floor for what may be the last time.
It’s important to note that Do You Still Love Me? has not been confirmed as the final album by Planes Mistaken For Stars. Bands have picked themselves up, regrouped and carried on. Only the surviving members know what they should do. From first note to last, loss permeates every fiber of this record, but the album contains some of the most cathartic and flat-out impressive music they’ve ever written. “We both know existence is cruel,” O’Donnell reminds the listener in the album’s final stretch, but there’s something poetic about the band hauling themselves over the finish line after chemo and radiation could very easily have meant their frontman just couldn’t sign off on his vocal takes. They wrote and recorded this album like their lives depended on it; they always have. There will never be another like Gared O’Donnell—if this is the band’s second act cut painfully short, then this is a hell of a way to go out. Uncomfortable, unflinching, unrivalled; their thunder will echo in the night forever.
Label: Deathwish
Year: 2024
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