Popcorn Noises

Benoît Pioulard - “Lasted”

I don’t know if you will think this is cool or uncool, but I just spent the last half hour trying to transcribe the lyrics of this song into something that made at least poetic sense and it appears I’ve failed miserably. It’s not that Thomas Meluch, the Portland artist who records windswept folk pop as Benoît Pioulard, buries his deep mumble so far down in the mix that you can’t hear it or writes such syllabic nonsense that you can never be sure you’re hearing the word you think you’re hearing, but the effect is related to that.

On the one hand, Meluch does a uniquely great job of blending all the elements of his songs together. There’s never just one guitar part, but the handful of guitar parts all overlap neatly with one another so that they sound like the work of one magical, masterful fretboard (that includes bass too—you don’t hear it as much on “Lasted,” but he’s quite fond of blending bass chords into the guitar so there’s no distinct ‘line’). His take on percussion usually involves dull thudding sounds that could just as well be a palm slapping an acoustic’s hollow body, along with finger snaps, generic taps, and shuffling shakers that either frame the stereo spectrum or wander aimlessly from left to right and back again so that all the wobbly rhythmic textures get incorporated back into the thick movement of the guitar. When a fuzzy organ rises up and briefly quells the rest of the song, it feels less like a new voice than a kind of white noise—an audible silence that makes space for Meluch’s dramatic pause.

But of course, tradition and cultural breeding tell us that acoustic / folk-based music is spare and quiet so that it’s easier to hear the words, which are supposed to be more evocative, etc. I guess that’s where my frustration with not being able to pin down “Lasted”s libretto comes from: it feels like the right thing to do, even though in this case it’s not. Meluch is graciously insistent on doubling and tripling his voice and melding it into the rest of the song. He has a monastic and slightly haunting flair for melody and his pervasive harmonies share a certain 60s psych mood with The Zombies or Caribou’s Andorra. It feels thick the same way the guitar and percussion do, not ethereal or hazy but physical and finely detailed. You can make out a lot of words and phrases on “Lasted” (I like “Fibers and dyes for clothing our sire,” or “A shrugging posture for a moon / a pattern cast throughout the pasture,” and even the simplicity of the last line, “How miserable you are”), but what they mean is wrapped up in how they sound coming out of this overdubbed gale and how they only seem to make it half way to your ears. To me, “Lasted” is a song with a secret to tell, but one that you wouldn’t totally understand even if you could hear it.