CD Reviews

Bert Jansch and Benoît Pioulard
By Bernardo Rondeau

Bert Jansch
The Black Swan
(Drag City)
3 out of 5

Nearing his 63rd birthday with a new addition to over four decades’ worth of music (which has already influenced the likes of Jimmy Page and Neil Young), Bert Jansch’s pinched, weary voice and radiant fretwork will never be heard on the Classic Rock FMscape just as his lambchop’d and long-haired younger self won’t grace VH1 Classic’s nostalgia-feed.

A few years younger than Bob Dylan, Jansch may hardly receive the same plaudits and press as Modern Times for his own The Black Swan, though it’s a no less weighty reflection on life from the far end as that of America’s cranky oracle. Jansch’s profile may be low, particularly outside his native United Kingdom, but his craft has always remained solid. Landing in the States through Drag City, The Black Swan finds Jansch joining a roster of free folk’s least-weird contingent – willowy Espers, weltering Joanna Newsom, ethereal White Magic and brawny Six Organs of Admittance – who are not wholly removed from the label’s tradition of detourned rockist classicism as perfected by inimitable “singer-songwriters” like Will Oldham, David Berman, Jim O’Rourke and Bill Callahan.

While his most recent releases found Jansch joined by his younger British admirers (namely former Suede whammy-wizard Bernard Butler and the newly Modest-Mouse-anointed Johnny Marr), The Black Swan may have Beth Orton harmonizing with Devendra Banhart or even taking the lead herself. But it’s less an album of spangly guest turns than the regal contemplations of the master. Cosmic mysticism, Dubya blues and an eco-anthem aside, the bare elegance of The Black Swan depends less on topicality than Jansch’s discreet delivery and luminous jangle.

Benoît Pioulard
Précis
(Kranky)
3 out of 5

After years releasing limited-run CDRs, cassettes and vinyl, Thomas Meluch dons his Benoît Pioulard handle for a Kranky debut of glacial majesty. A staff member of Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International, Meluch traffics in some of that label’s gauzy melancholia even while favoring iridescent acoustic-guitar strums over drum machine thump. That said, Meluch still swathes his twinkling, bedroom sketches with wisps of textured electricity and the distinct patter of machine music.

Singing in a melodious hush and wielding glistening hooks on occasion, Meluch’s home-recorded, soft-focus pop unintentionally highlights the intensity of Ariel Pink’s spasmodic pageant of lo-fi invention. For one thing, Meluch’s jingling shapes don’t dissolve into their amorphous environs. But the more salient aspect of this seemingly random comparison is that what Meluch’s delicate and small songs may lack in the uncanny department – where Pink is loudly tenured – they compensate for in spectral intimacy.

Just like he feigns a French identity – not just in his chosen moniker but also Francophone song and album titles as well as smart “J’Aime Benoît Pioulard” badges – Meluch opens Précis with the familiar wisps of red herring. For three minutes, the clatter of morphing, crystalline currents of “La Guerre de Sept Ans” implies a course of all-out droney abstraction but one which Meluch detours from immediately. Second track “Together & Down” evinces his true palette and design: serene voice swimming through rattling chords in a translucent fog of misty tones and vaporous rhythm trails. Stately even when surrounded by buzzing engines and writhing distortions, Meluch resembles the dark silhouette that graces the disc’s sleeve. A haze of blurred light blobs, like falling snow or glass-clung water droplets, cannot obscure a crisp and clear outline.