Planning For Burial,  the brainchild of Thom Wasluck, present their latest album,  Below The house. This is a mix of shoe-gaze,  doom, 90s alt rock and drone.  It is a return to form of sorts to Planning for Burial’s beloved first album, 2010’s Leaving.

Spanning nine tracks, this album opens with “Whiskey And Wine”: a four minute meltdown of a track that could easily be by Killdozer. It’s heavy, distorted and funereally slow in it’s pace.  “Threadbare” begins almost like a country track, before it to becomes a heavy slow paced distorted track.  There is something to hook you in, and the hooks are good. But you do find yourself wishing things would just pick up a bit.

When a band aren’t constrained by genre there really isn’t any reason to just stay in tempos that only heavily asthmatic teens can steadily dance to! That said, the songs do stand up to scrutiny, “Somewhere In The Evening” is a glorious melee of frequencies that has just enough of a moribund feel to make you ache through the distortion. That said, “The Warmth Of you” is just torturously good, and the outstanding track of the album, and thankfully, the vocals aren’t distorted which just adds to the effect.

Where Thom succeeds is writing beautifully heart-achingly beautiful songs. Where he fails, in my humble opinion, is giving an album a rise and fall, something to move along with.  “Past Lives” is the tails of effects mixed into a sloth-like bass and drones. One could say it’s a filler, except for the fact its wonderful!

Dull knife 1 and 2 are all guitar noise and stretched melody that last over sixteen minutes in total and, unfortunately, fail to ignite anything. These two tracks let the album down, because the ending, “Below The house” is a haunting and quite insecure track that closes the album perfectly, and does have you wanting to put the needle straight back to track one.

Comparisons are odious I know, however this album is like Red House Painters covered by Killdozer remixed by Kevin Shields and then slowed even further. It’s good, it’s heavy, it could just do with a occassionally lightening up; even darkness needs some light.