Review Summary: No silver linings.
Befitting an album cover that’s two-thirds barren overcast sky encompassing a row of houses delicately topped with snow,
Below the House is a ceremony of gloom and desolation. Thom Wasluck’s project Planning for Burial is many things, both felt and heard.
The tone setter “Whiskey & Wine” dispenses with caution in mere seconds by unleashing gross growling guitar chords. With pounding percussion around him, he eventually roars into a microphone with draining and urgent distortion. It’s a crushing display of emotion apposite to his words of despair. The rest of the song is filled out with glockenspiel notes and sleigh bells before a hard cut to the glockenspiel playing out over a warm pad.
Such peculiarities to metal are the norm across the album, as is the melancholy nature of his lyrics and performances. The follow up track introduces soft speech with little else until pointillistic keys dance atop another wall of heavy riffing. In this manner
Below the House doesn’t feature notable structures, proceeding as a more free-flowing album that blends shoegaze and metal with carefully executed drone and ambient. The songs are dense, beautiful, and peppered with the uneasiness of trudging, and at times deliberately ill-timed, percussion. Forty-four minutes of music unfold through the ebbing and flowing of these sonic polarities.
An undoubted highlight comes in the form of “Dull Knife pt. II”, a nearly twelve-minute drama bled into from part one. A few spoken words haunt the background of softly strummed acoustic chords accented by electric notes, both swelled and picked. Thom eventually lands on repetitions of “calling me back home” as he’s joined by a choir, and the stage is set. More off time percussion and piano turn the final five minutes into a slow building catharsis until the elegy ends on a few strums of a guitar string.
You'd be forgiven for finding difficulty in listening to such a set of sorrowful songs.
Below the House is certainly a journey, revealed to be a hopeless one in short time. But while its placid moments are soon belied by their brutish counterparts, it can be oddly comforting. Happiness doesn’t exist without sadness.
