Review
Planning For Burial
Below The House

Would you rather a musician be great live commanding all manner of powers that conjure spirits and whisk the entire gathering to a place of other or of temporary enlightenment, or would you rather that same musician be a paragon of studio craft, wielding instruments like a paintbrush and the studio like a canvas?

I was standing on the side of the stage at Saint Vitus in New York feeling the embrace of wave after wave of sound hit me like a crushing tsunami as Planning For Burial was finishing up the set of its record release, and a question just happened to smack me upside the head while my eyes were shut and a big goofy grin adorned my face that, at first, was going to remain squarely in my noggin; the question was not dissimilar to the one that I just asked you readers but had a bit more personal meaning for myself that has stuck with me for days. Just how far and how long has this journey of echoed sentiments and strange happenstance been, and is that journey coming to an end or is one chapter closing and another opening; if time is a constant, which I am not altogether certain that it is, what marker does Below The House signify as far as the work of Mr. Wasluck and its relationship to his growing cadre of fans?

Below The House continues to give me question after question while experiencing the record in a myriad of forms (CDs, MP3s, the vinyl version) as I continue to try to wrap my head around the sounds and melodies that populate the record like the people that one imagines live under the roofs of the houses on the cover sitting below the winter sky, but I keep arriving at this notion that Wasluck has arrived at just the right cross section of the first question, particularly sitting here while listening to the album and reminiscing about the record release show performance that continues to tick out in my mind as one of the most powerful performances of Planning For Burial; Below The House may polish off some of the hard edge and noise but also allows more room for the cool nuances and catchy as hell melodies, and truly, the most hum-able moments occur in some of the noisiest movements (the ending of “Dull Knife Pt. I” continually revisits its swirling oscillations in my head).

Day in and day out many of us drift through the gray and gloomy days that dot (or overwhelm) our days hoping for someone to start “Calling me back home”, and while the intention of the words and tones of “Dull Knife Pt. II” may not be the powerful longing that I feel every god damn time the record hits the section, it is one of the strongest emotions that have tugged at these old and jaded heart strings in what seems like a lifetime and is usually reserved for the sad remembrance of past loved ones and fallen heroes; those moody elements inhabit the nooks and crannies of Below The House in various elements from the melancholy opening movements of “Whiskey & Wine” (those opening chords are crushing but when the swirling lead rushes in from the ether… magic), and the gut punching crunch that kicks “Threadbare” into gear sets the stage for Wasluck’s vocals in all the right ways whereas the vocals are similarly set up with a very different sounding “Somewhere In The Evening”, both of which display how the seeming disparate sounds build a wonderful whole.

If Planning For Burial has progressed away from the pure intentions of the artist to being experienced in any number of ways by the broad band of listeners that brush wings with Below The House, perhaps Thom Wasluck’s main artistic vehicle has in some way arrived and is now no longer just his; maybe this album is the marker that signifies just how an artist’s work becomes part of the fabric of a culture of people.