I’m a very sensitive and empathetic person. It’s a part of my personality that I’m sometimes at odds with, but mainly accept and cherish. I cry at weddings, at funerals, if I see something sweet or something sad. I cry reading books and watching films, and, sometimes, I cry listening to music, too. It hasn’t happened super frequently, but certain songs get me. On some days, if I’m already feeling a bit fragile, and the unplugged version of Alice In Chains’ “Nutshell” comes on on the radio, I have to leave the room because I can’t deal with how heavy it is. I knew that Do You Still Love Me? would get to me, but I didn’t anticipate how much. It’s not just sad – there’s an existential frustration to it, a doom-laden ire, mixed in with grief and love and nostalgia and a defiant bristling against the inevitability of death.
Planes Mistaken for Stars began writing Do You Still Love Me? during Covid lockdowns, shortly after frontman Gared O’Donnell had received a cancer diagnosis. While he was alive for long enough to record all his guitar and vocal tracks and have input on the track listing of the album, he never got to hear the album in its finished form. Unsurprisingly, Do You Still Love Me? was heavily influenced by his impending passing, and encompasses not just his emotions during this time, but the rest of the band’s grappling to come to terms with it, too. Planes had already lost founding guitarist Matt Bellinger in 2017, an unexpected and devastating death. The album is a testament to both men, not a tribute as much as an emotional bloodletting and cathartic exposing of what death and dying means not just to the victim, but their friends and family, too.
Despite the album’s tragic backstory, Do You Still Love Me? is far from just doom and gloom. Of course, there are moments of pure anger and sadness and defeat, but it’s one thing above all else – beautifully complex, in an emotional sense. Musically, we’re looking at post-hardcore, noise rock, grunge, and sludge. The songs are well-written, dense, with moments of brilliant musicality, but the album’s visceral energy is what really sets it apart. The opening song, “Matthew is Dead”, is built almost entirely on one musical idea, and yet it’s one of the hardest hitters on an album filled almost exclusively with hard hitters. The second verse in particular tears at my chest: ‘And Matthew, if you knew/How fierce I tied your heart to mine/You’d die a thousand times‘. Occasional sounds of glass breaking become ever more frequent, until the song disintegrates into smashing, screaming, an unbridled unleashing of emotion.
One of the album’s shortest tracks at just over two minutes long, “Further” is a standout for me. It’s a high-energy bop that seems to be an imploration to enjoy the time we’ve got. The angular ascending guitar line screams over the repeated chorus lyric of ‘we’ve only got the night’ – it drives adrenaline through every cell in my body. By the time the second verse ends with the line ‘let’s push this further’, my skin has, on every listen, erupted with goosepimples, and every fibre of my being tingles with the desire to do something, to do more with my life. This song is an epi-pen for lethargy, an electric shock to force broken hearts to start beating again.
By complete contrast, “Punch the Gauge” is the longest an arguably dreariest song on Do You Still Love Me?. It, too, holds a special place in my heart. It’s dark and sparkling, a meandering meditation, and again only has very few lyrics. More words are not needed – Planes paint such a vivid scene through layers of distorted guitars, delay, reverb, noise, a slow, heavy build that becomes a wall of sound, an impenetrable, choking fog, until it’s hard to breathe. And just like “Matthew is Dead”, “Punch the Gauge” ends with banging, screaming, smashing, a release of pent-up rage, cold and harrowing. This song heralds in the album’s heaviest era, the trinity of excellence consisting of “Punch the Gauge”, “Do You Still Love Me? No. 1”, and “Run Rabbit Run”.
“Do You Still Love Me? No. 1” is a brief interlude of chugs and siren guitars, musically quite sparse, but its lyrics are so poignant that I just have to put them all here now, because every line is a heart-wrenching masterpiece:
‘I was told I was found on the clearance shelf,
Next to the razors and books on self-help.
A joint that was rolled with a jilted grace,
A carton of smokes and a crisis case you just can’t live without.
You just can’t live without.I don’t have the shakes, the shakes have me.
Do you still love me?’
The final song of the mid-album trifecta is “Run Rabbit Run”. Perhaps the most radio-friendly song on Do You Still Love Me?, this is a sweet mid-tempo track that’s warm and catchy while still maintaining Planes’ trademark dark edge. It’s the kind of song I never tire of, its verses simple and almost relaxed, its chorus more driving and expansive. As always, the guitar tones are tastefully chosen, with attention to the detail of the layering, the bass a solid backbone, and the drums supportive while never being simple or boring.
Thirteen songs make up Do You Still Love Me?, each one more painful than the last. I struggled with this album, not because I didn’t like it, but because I just found it so hard to come to terms with. I make a lot of art with themes of death, I work with bones and taxidermy, I constantly listen to extreme metal that is based almost entirely around visions of war, torture, anguish, and demise, and yet none of that even comes close to bringing me to tears, and I’m a stranger to grief in my personal life. The second time I heard this album, I found myself curled up on the ground with tears seeping out of my eyes. The intense feelings behind Do You Still Love Me?, paired with the complete unfairness of knowing that vocalist Gared won’t ever hear it and mixed with feeling so deeply sorry for his friends and family that he left behind – it’s a lot. I’ve been lucky so far that I haven’t lost anyone from my immediate circle, but I know the day is coming, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Every single song on Do You Still Love Me? deserves your full and undivided attention. Difficult as the album is, it feels somehow sacred, intimate. Obviously I didn’t know Gared or Matt, the two members of Planes Mistaken for Stars who are no longer with us. I do hope their friends, families, and bandmates can take some small solace in the fact that, even though they’re gone, they’re still touching peoples’ lives. I consider it a huge privilege that the band has allowed me and others across the globe to share a small, but very personal, part of their lives. Theirs is a story that needed to be told, and it is an honour to hear.
