Planning For Burial / Lonesummer - Split (Music Ruins Lives, 2010)

Planning For Burial - Sleeping In Separate Rooms


DUDES. Fuckin split of the year right here. Gloom & doom bliss from Planning For Burial and unbridled hatred courtesy of Lonesummer on the same motherfucking record. This is the real shit, guys. The best of the best.

PFB's 3 tracks are a bit different than what he put out on Leaving. A little more vocal oriented, maybe a bit poppier & shoegazier, but in the saddest way possible. This is the beautiful Icelandic epic shit you love thrown to the bottom of a well where it turned into a warped depressed beast of buzz, static, & drone. Plodding drums, mournful organs, blackened rumbled, all with a decidedly catchy twist. This dude knows how to mix the gorgeous celestial washes of euphoria with the basement hiding grim neurosis so perfectly. Unbelievably awesome. You will want to listen to this for fucking ever.

Strip all of PFB's happiness and you're left with Lonesummer's neverending brutality. His black noise metal is as harsh as it gets, with no hope for redemption. It's loud as FUCK, reigning blistering chaos. A wall of black metal so dense it becomes noise. The drums & cymbals blast into a homogeneous cacophony, the guitars shred, wail, & buzz, and the vocals are a tortured screeching, totally obscured in pain. But then there are songs like "I Wish I Could Delete Last Night" that are like a slow (black metal) pop song with a legit guitar solo that just might get caught in loop in your head. This guy is totally fucking into it. Bleak, depressing as shit, noisy, hateful, evil, and still utterly fucking beautiful. Anti-black metal that stands high above most other bedroom BM freaks.

There is no way you should let this slip under your radar. If you haven't heard of either of these guys yet (wtf is wrong with you?), they are making what is hands down some of the most amazing masochistic bliss out there. This split is cheap as hell ($6 preorder) and only 100 copies will be made. So get over to the newly minted Music Ruins Lives and grab yourself a copy before it's sold out and you have to go cry to your momma about how your trigger finger is getting sloppy.

Planning For Burial - Leaving (Enemies List, 2010)

Planning For Burial - Oh Pennsylvania Your Black Clouds Hang Low


Planning For Burial's Leaving was available as a free download for quite a while, since sometime last year actually. Despite its shear fucking awesomeness and the dozens of times I've listened to it, Leaving never managed to get any time on AGB. That is absolutely despicable.

Now that it has a supremely packaged physical release on one of the newest/coolest labels, Enemies List (home to Have A Nice Life), I can't ignore the power of Planning For Burial any longer.

It made the rounds a bit on the blogs and stuff so I'm hoping most of you already known what this shit is all about. Hence this review is more for the physical release than the actual music but for those that haven't yet imbibed, let me fill you in. Leaving is quite possibly the most amazing record ever to mix shoegaze, metal, doom, drone, and everything beautifully badass. Seriously epic songs that fill your heart with joy and make your ears fucking bleed. Crank this motherfucker up and let the bliss wash over you while you bang your head. Honestly, just listen to that track up there and tell me that you've ever heard a better song.

Now it's time for everyone to praise Enemies List for bringing the ethereal to this mortal world in the most fantastic way possible. For $10, you get one from an edition of 200 hand numbered copies in an oversized black envelope. Inside there's 3 large black & white cards with images of rooftops & houses & the like which all line up to read "TIMEISNTALWAYSGOOD" (I think) on one side and liner notes on the other. And then there's the CD-R itself, housed in a glossy cardboard sleeve with the art seen above and tracklisting, and the same cherry blossom art is printed on the actual disc. This couldn't be any more fucking perfect.