Since he first started putting out solo singles as Porcelain Raft in 2010, former Sunny Day Sets Fire frontman Mauro Remiddi has built a career on an indie/electro/dreampop blend so smooth it often obscures his songwriting gifts. With Microclimate, his third Porcelain Raft full-length, Remiddi grows as a songwriter/arranger while refining the subtlety of his approach. Of course, the problem with subtlety is that it’s not particularly noticeable when you get better at it. So when you compare Microclimate to 2015’s Half Awake EP, 2013’s Permanent Signal, and his 2012 full-length debut Strange Weekend, Remiddi doesn’t appear to be offering much of anything new.
Like those previous releases, the sense of space on Microclimate is so vast and full that it’s as if Remiddi and mixing engineer Chris Coady meant for the music to be projected across a fluffy cloudscape that stretches for miles. The wide-angle scope of the music can sometimes engulf its central figure, especially as he relies more heavily on soft electronic beats and plush reverbs. On skittering numbers like “Distant Shore” and “Kookaburra,” for example, Remiddi recaptures the vibe of “West End Girls”-era Pet Shop Boys—but it takes multiple listens to notice that he’s managed to do so in his own image.
If, say, Remiddi dressed these tunes in stripped-down arrangements centered around piano or acoustic guitar (as he does at the beginning of “Kookaburra”), the somewhat oddly-shaped relationship between his chord progressions and melodies would occupy center stage. Instead, you get songs like “Rising,” where the quietly moving parts nearly drown in a kind of auditory soup.
On the other hand, wading through all the heavy layers of atmosphere to discern the song at the core of each track is one of Microclimate's rewards. Like the last two albums, Microclimate was heavily inspired by locale—this time, the California desert. Remiddi has expressed both a romantic fascination for place and a sense of rootlessness in the past. Lyrically, the new material covers very little new ground with its airbrushed images of distant shores, breezes, trees. For a person who has worked as a circus musician and shaken hands with Kim Jong-un, Remiddi’s lyrics don't disclose much. On “Big Sur,” he implores an unspecified person to come “to another world” and “come on come on come on this way.” At the end of the song, he reassures us that “before you know it/all the answers are on the way.”
If the song asked more questions, perhaps the mystery of those answers would be more enticing. And when the album closes with the line “We are falling... falling into the sun” on “Zero Frames Per Second,” it would be nice to get a better sense for the kind of all-encompassing dissolution Remiddi wants to evoke. Nevertheless, as a pedal steel glimmers like setting sunlight reflecting over ocean waves on “Big Sur,” it's virtually impossible not to get nostalgic—even if you've never been to Big Sur. The music on Microclimate can be so potently affecting that the lack of lyrical precision ceases to matter.
“Microclimate” is the formal term for a set of climatic conditions that apply to a small ecosystem within a larger one. Remiddi chose the title as a way of signaling that he wanted each song to stand apart from the rest. Sure enough, each song pulls you into its own standalone “world,” so to speak. But because Remiddi also sustains an ear-pleasing flow between those songs, it may take a few listens to recognize and appreciate what an artistic success Microclimate actually is.
