Sonnet feels like a regeneration for Benoît Pioulard, the alias of Seattle-based Michigan transplant Thomas Meluch. The album contains elements of his prior work under the name—particularly its general tone of melancholy and disrepair—but he chooses to zone in on the drifty and (mostly) instrumental side of his music for this album. It’s a subtle shift but not an insignificant one—he sounds more confident and in control than on Hymnal, which veered closer to a grab-bag aesthetic. As is often the case when artists reinvent what they’re doing, Meluch had to go backward to move forward, forgoing digital tools to work in an analog environment. The results are more otherworldly, with tiny drones and banks of noise and blocks of tape hiss all coiling around one another, locked tight in an uneasy embrace that only Meluch can connect or disconnect.
What Sonnet gains over other albums Meluch has made is a more acute sense of direction. The tone varies in shades throughout, sounding like a lost radio broadcast fighting through static, or music humming quietly out of a dysfunctional intercom in a broken down hospital. At some points it reaches such a level of atrophy that it feels like the instruments are disintegrating in Meluch's hands as he records with them. It’s an album that will get slotted into the ambient category, but it’s not ambient in the sense of being something to relax to or to have on in the background. It’s more arresting than that, as ideas crystallize in short, ever-repeating loops.
Meluch's method here is to take field recordings of industrial equipment and nature and attempt to replicate them on guitar. But Sonnet isn’t an album that benefits from being broken down into parts—it’s best consumed whole, in a single sitting, where Meluch’s sense of exploration can truly unfold. At times, he’s knee-deep in sludge, making tar-like guitar lines sound like something you wade through. At others, he’s up in the stratosphere, channeling the mesh between krautrock and shoegaze that Flying Saucer Attack were practicing circa Further.
Vocals come rarely on Sonnet—Meluch removed most of them while paring down the album to its core emotions. When they do appear, they're just another element ghosting into the murk. The result is often reminiscent of the space Leyland Kirby works in when he records as the Caretaker, all haunted mirrors and nearly forgotten memories, constructed at the very point where those things feel like they’re about to permanently slip into oblivion. Sonnet positions Meluch somewhere beyond the insular place he occupied before.
