Benoit Pioulard

Tom Meluch moved from Michigan to Oregon and has brought the foggy lake weather with him. Temper is the follow-up to his 2006 album, Précis, both released under his pseudonym, which came to him in a dream. Dreaminess factors into the lucid but wispy way Meluch tells his tales. Recording in a bedroom digitally, he imports elemental field recordings to underline delicate, finger picked acoustic guitar and his gentle, layered vocals. The results this time around are a little more confident and optimistic but are still hushed like a sunny Nick Drake idyll. Little waking fragments of melody are fashioned into gilded keyholes that separate songs in adjacent rooms. And the songs are compact packages that still contain hours’ worth of clockwork ticking, birdsongs, underwater breathing and heartbeats. It’s a bedside album that will sit perfectly next to your dream journal and wave generator.