Send "Benoit Pioulard " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Tinymixtapes |
 Thomas Meluch doesn't make songs so much as soufflés. His records are small miracles of texture, computer-cooked confections, one part plaintive folk, one part chiffony electronic wash — add a teaspoon of field recording and a pinch of static. They hang suspended in a sliver of no man's land, between the fuzzier ambient realm of his more esteemed Kranky compatriots and the catchier, brighter bevy of bands more often dubbed "dream pop." This genre-lessness cuts both ways: on one hand, it blacklights how blandly amorphous this faux-Frenchman's music can be; on the other, it helps prove how Meluch has carved himself a distinct little niche.Lasted isolates the two main components of his sound more discretely than his widely embraced debut Precís did; this time around, each track clearly follows the pattern of either Tim Hecker-esque synthesized washout or lustrously plucked, gently baritone-ed bedroom canticle. This approach frontgrounds Meluch's most obviously appealing traits, but also leaves his weak suits less guarded from scrutiny. On the whole, it's the ambient passages that falter. Meluch's billows of tape decay and spun-out guitar just don't carry the narrative quality of Hecker or the stately space of Stars of the Lid. They're dense but toothless, made only more so by the occasional vocal "ooh" or traffic noise smeared on top. The abstract sketches that filled Precís were quicker and more compelling than these, which wear out their still-short three-minute durations. Out of all the non-vocal tracks on Lasted, only “Nod,” which concludes the album and spreads over five minutes, entirely justifies its existence by kicking up a respectable cloud of static....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Portland’s Benoît Pioulard starts writing his songs with an acoustic guitar and finishes by adding atmosphere. The listener hears this in reverse order: surface noise first, then finger-picked nylon strings. Thomas Meluch sounds more like a singer-songwriter than most of his Kranky labelmates, but Lasted, his latest album, is as much a mutually dependent hybrid of folk and ambient as the two that preceded it, Précis and Temper. His voice, the sequencing of the album, and its concision all indicate that he’s improving as a musician, but these adaptations are incidental to this music’s static appeal. This isn’t better or worse than anything else he’s done, it’s just more. Meluch calls his Polaroids “instant artifacts.” Lasted’s songs, both the poppy ones and the interludes, are composed of equal parts field recordings, analog haze and tentatively sung melodies. They are collections of instant artifacts. It seems as if Meluch is still surprised by the songs he makes, even though he keeps making the same album. “Shouting Distance” is the pop song here — there’s always one per album — and if you’re not listening closely enough, it makes sitting through the other songs feel like a drag when they’re actually pretty good. You can hear Pioulard pulling back from that kind of accessibility on songs like “RTO,” which on a songwriting basis is probably the equal of “Shouting Distance,” but checks its momentum and just hovers pleasantly instead of spilling forth. Pioulard chooses not to choose between ambient and pop, and this kind of persistence contrasts with former labelmates Deerhunter, whose career has been about outgrowing its early ambient adventures. But this music works very differently: Where Deerhunter’s drone experiments were sprawling and instrumental, Pioulard’s are concise and structurally important to the music. Neither the ambient parts nor the songs are much fun without the other half. There are moments of instrumental ambience, though. First track “Purse Discusses” introduces the record with a distant train whistle and a drone that wobbles out of a tape machine. Throughout the rest of the album, Pioulard alternates between songs and mellow interludes whose tone is slightly more pastoral and downbeat than the songs. This going back and forth is the sound of “domestic isolation” — words that the press release uses to describe Meluch’s working conditions and a state that must resonate with his audience. In terms of Björk albums, Pioulard fans are Vespertine people: they embrace the inscrutable as proof of a rich inner life. Benoît Pioulard’s barely comprehensible lyrics, while clearly as smart as the rest of the package, fit the shape of the music without the burden of interpretation....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| The music Thomas Meluch makes as Benoît Pioulard has always sounded cinematic. Using his deep, hushed voice, acoustic guitar, and smattering of electronic textures, his mix of dusky, introverted soft-focus indie-pop and ambient textures bring to mind flickering, aged film footage. This trend continues on Lasted, Meluch's third full-length under the name. The songs here share sonic concerns, but have no specific or overriding theme connecting them. Lasted sounds like a well-curated collection of miniatures that Meluch had stored away for later use, dusting them off and presenting them together when they felt ready. But it also feels like it's best experienced whole. Indeed, what makes Lasted feel more complete than Meluch's previous records is how he weaves his interstitial tone pieces within the fabric of the more straightforward, poppier material. On 2006's Précis and 2008's Temper, those interludes seemed to exist solely to provide sonic variety; here, it's hard to imagine some of these songs without their lead-ins or fade-outs, like the way the crackling vinyl stop of opener "Purse Discusses" introduces "Sault"'s metric guitar lines. And some of the connecting threads are particularly subtle, like the rattling field recording that segues the title track into the stately interlude "Weird Door", for example. The album invites you to listen closely. Production details aside, Meluch's songwriting has never been stronger. He's always had a way with glowing melodies-- 2007's underlooked single "Fir" certainly proved as much-- and they're equally present here. The easy-moving gait of "A Coin on the Tongue" suits Meluch's clear, shy vocals perfectly, while he's buried under beds of tickled piano and subtle drone on "Fluoresce". You can't make out a lot of what he's saying throughout the record, but the words still seem personal, somehow; Lasted is one of those albums whose meaning will shift depending on what you bring to the listening experience....full text |
Benoit Pioulard lyrics
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