Pitchfork

We're in the middle of a deluge of late-afternoon music: song after song drenched in reverb and echo, inching along at plodding, hot sun tempos, compositions stalked by not-quite-there vocals. It's a universal feeling if geography is any indication. In Northern California, the duo Brightblack Morning Light make music fit for drowning in; in Baltimore, Beach House ply their own hazy trade; and in Chicago, Califone murmur and strum. Benoît Pioulard, the nom de guerre of Michigan multi-instrumentalist Thomas Meluch, might belong here too: he has the same insular hum, the same repetitive song craft, the same lazy pace. But Précis, at heart, is a striver record: one that can't leave you alone.

Much has been made of the idiot savant quality of Pioulard's first release. Burnished by a home tapes legend, where his intimate songs were passed, we're meant to believe, via cassette and CD-R into so many enlightened bedrooms, Benoît Pioulard has already been hailed as a master romantic, arriving on scene with a record that belies his supposed inexperience. At first blush, Précis is all of that: evocative, nostalgic, romantic, intimate. As his beautifully simple chord progressions tumble out, they erase their prior referents; moments of beauty on "Ext. Leslie Park" or "Ash Into The Sky" are sharp, pointed, returning like cathected memories.

In this, Meluch's music is sometimes reminiscent less of the Basinki tape-loops and Boards of Canada ambiance that he often cites as influences than of a more maudlin, if incandescent, inspiration: Elliott Smith. Like Smith, Meluch's method of getting into your head is to coo into your ear. The high-gloss pathos that infect "Triggering Back", "Palimend", and "Hirondelle"-- half the album, really-- have that same already-decided emotional charge to them that infiltrated Smith's work. Catch you on rainy day, or one where your girl or guy left, and these songs might make you weep. Otherwise, all you'll hear is naked effort.

As a craftsman of sound, Pioulard is as compositionally solid as Max Richter or as playfully complex as Mark Mothersbaugh. His cluttered, dense mixes are what he truly has in common with the Califones and Brightblacks of the world. And yet there it is again, that insistent vocal croon, demanding your attention in every spot where the rest of his mix plays hands-off. The cracked warble of his intermediate and transitional tracks-- "Moth Wings", "Corpus Chant", and "La Guerre de Sept Ans"-- have a depth and transistor-crackle beauty to them that no anxiously confessional vocal can touch. These are where Meluch's strengths lie: between and amongst the layers, in the dead time. And yet we're treated to song after song. Who needs another auteur?