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(2018) Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage
Review:
There’s obviously a good reason French singer Melody Prochet gave herself the nom de plume, Melody’s Echo Chamber. Her self-titled debut album some five years or so ago was produced by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and it was filled with all these little psych-pop gems that Prochet was throwing toward your ears.
She’s back with Bon Voyage, her second album, that certainly again deserves the Melody’s Echo Chamber moniker. Not that there’s (or was) that much echo, but the album can certainly fall into the Psychedelic category. A good one at that. No Parker this time around, but the Swedish psych giants Dungen with Reine Fiske chipping in the most, and Nicholas Albrook from Pond and Frederik Swahn from The Amazing are around.
You could say it doesn’t necessarily move away from Tame Impala’s psych-pop touch, but that it does give it another psych twist.
Prochet takes on the production duties and certainly makes the whole thing a bon voyage – a good trip. What we get is a combination of the distinct French touch to the vocals, with a bit off-kilter song structures employed by such French giants as Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Fontaine (something Stereolab played on too), with the Swedish crew making that bridging sound between Psych and Prog, characteristic of Canterbury sounding bands like Caravan that Dungen are so good at. As the first track “Cross My Heart” so nicely exemplifies, it is all given a current production touch, giving it that ‘today’ sheen.
Prochet not only stresses the ‘voyage’ part by singing in English, French and Swedish, but also introduces Eastern musical elements (“Desert Horse”) and coaxes her collaborators and herself to try out the instruments they didn’t do so before (she plays the drums on “Breathe In, Breathe Out” for the first time).
They all manage to make the album and the songs seamless and unified, where you can notice the difference in languages, but it all sounds so normal and logical. What we do get is a set of seven Psych gems of varying sizes but all of the excellent quality that goes beyond the Psych-pop and gives the music an extra set of touches, that prove that Prochet has an interesting and enjoyable bag of Psych tricks hidden in her echo chamber. She and her collaborators just revealed some of them to us.
Tracklist:
01 Cross My Heart.flac
02 Breathe In, Breathe Out.flac
03 Desert Horse.flac
04 Var Har Du Vart.flac
05 Quand Les Larmes D'un Ange Font Danser La Neige.flac
06 Visions Of Someone Special, On A Wall Of Reflections.flac
07 Shirim.flac
Summary:
Country: France
Genre: dream-pop, indie-rock
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 732-923 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits |
