Since releasing his first LP, Précis, in 2006, Thomas Meluch (aka Benoît Pioulard) has hauled his acoustic guitar, effects pedals, and samplers from Michigan to indie rock's West Coast mecca, Portland (apparently Brooklyn is finally full). Relocation hasn't had a perceptible effect on Meluch's DIY M.O.-- not yet, anyway. Even if Temper's opener "Ragged Tint" deploys a more aggressive, even violent, guitar figure than anything found on Précis, the albums are for the most part woven of similar strands of instrument and machine, pop and art, beauty and noise.
Nevertheless, location-- or, rather, dislocation-- seems to remain one of the project's core concerns. Meluch never has, to my knowledge, satisfactorily explained his French-inflected pseudonym (it, uh, came to him in a dream) and it's mighty tempting to write it off, along with his conspicuous song titles, as student pretension (he just recently graduated from college). The name does, however, plant a few helpful signposts to Europe and critics are, unsurprisingly, fond of comparing Benoît Pioulard with Fennesz, Four Tet, Boards of Canada, and any handy Gallic laptop act. Considering Meluch's slack enunciation and pretty much incomprehensible (English) lyrics, he might as well be singing in French (or Italian or Serbo-Croatian). Then again, Zach Baron's Pitchfork review of Précis makes just as compelling a case for Benoît Pioulard's kinship with state-siders Brightblack Morning Light and Califone.
Hell, I'll point north. Droning interludes "Ardoise", "Sweep Generator", and the mournful cello-lined "Tapyre"-- plus the way many of Meluch's flatly sung melodies slip their instrumental and found-sound shells gently, as if by accident-- resemble a folkier, less geeky version of Dan Snaith's Manitoba and early Caribou work. "Golden Grin"'s archaic-sounding tune could be a afterthought to the fuzzy noise collage that precedes it, as if Meluch left a recorder in the woods and happened to capture a passing hiker's song. Temper offers a few straight pop pieces ("Ahn" and "Idyll"), that plop vocals at the fore and recognize other conventional mixing hierarchies. But in "Physic" and "The Loom Pedal", Meluch's tamped-down voice enjoys no more authority than the guitar arpeggios, shuffling beats, or tape hiss. Like the album art's diffused light Polaroids, its music remains sonically and spacially uncertain.
However disparate its geographic points of reference, Temper is an artistically consistent, tonally temperate, record-- depending on your taste, maybe a little too balmy and dispassionate. If Meluch's lost anything on recent journeys, it isn't his fondness for wrapping yearning expansiveness in snug, even stifling, intimacy. "A Woolgathering Exodus", the album's lushest track, pulses with psychedelic, mind-expanding keys chords even as Meluch's voice implies that he's on the verge of nodding off before the fire. He doesn't have to decide between engagement or non-: The song fizzles out in static.
