FEATURE:
Second Spin
Melody's Echo Chamber – Melody's Echo Chamber
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BECAUSE Melody’s Echo Chamber’s…
latest album, Emotional Eternal, came out in April and won some incredible reviews, I wanted to concentrate on the eponymous debut studio album by French musician Melody Prochet. It was released on 25th September, 2012 on Weird World Record Co and Fat Possum Records. A remarkable and beautiful album, I don’t think it got all the positivity it could have. I am going to finish with a couple of positive reviews for Melody’s Echo Chamber. Spine-tingling, otherworldly and dreamy, if you are not aware of the work of Melody’s Echo Chamber, then the eponymous debut is a great place to start. It is an album that definitely requires fresh ears and a new take. Brooklyn Vegan spoke with Melody Prochet in 2012 around the release of Melody’s Echo Chamber. I have selected bits of the interview; they provide detail and depth about a incredible album that everyone should know and listen to:
“Having previously fronted the more overtly pop My Bee's Garden and The Narcoleptic Dancers, Melody Prochet discovered dreampop, enlisted the help of Tame Impala's Kevin Parker (a busy man this year) to capture the sounds in her head, and Melody's Echo Chamber was born. Recorded at Parker's home studio in Perth, Australia, and at Melody's grandparents' seaside home in the South of France, the self titled album -- out September 25 via Fat Possum -- is a gorgeous headtrip. You can stream a couple cuts from it below.
I met Melody on a very rainy late July afternoon to talk about the new album, finding her sound and how she's going pull it off live. On the latter, NYC will find out in October when Melody's Echo Chamber open for The Raveonettes at Webster Hall.
BV: You had a couple bands before this, very different sound. What made the change?
Melody Prochet: I just grew up, really. I've always been writing songs, and the people you meet they influence you. It wasn't till I was 19 that I heard the kind of music I listen to now, so for many years it was a different style. I hadn't digested all these new things.
Was there a certain record or group you heard where you were like, "Yes! This is the kind of music I want to make!"?
A million different records. I'm a fan of so much stuff I wouldn't know where to start. I was listening to Debussy at the same time I was listening to Spiritualized or Red Krayola, so it came from all over.
How did you end up working with Kevin from Tame Impala?
Two years ago my old band My Bee's Garden supported Tame Impala in Europe. We got along and we shared a lot of songs and it just blossomed into collaboration. It started with just a couple songs but it was really easy to work together. Complimentary opposites.
You say it was easy, but as a listener it sounds very dense and layered, like a lot of work.
I wasn't hard to make, it was very organic and natural. Most of what you hear are first takes and we did the drum sounds in two seconds. We put mikes on a pile of bricks in the yard because we didn't have professional setups. It was a very natural process, making the record. But I know what you mean, the production is really cool. I'm obsessed with production, though I'm not really good at it yet myself. I have the vision, but I need magic hands to do it for me. This record was my dream sound. I've tried for years to get it but finally found the right hands to sculpt it.
Did you come in with songs or was it more born out of the studio?
I came in with songs and some basic recordings but it was messy. Kevin helped figure out what we could keep, how to organize that mess. I tend to write pretty and dreamy songs -- I studied classical music for 12 years -- but I was boring myself so Kevin helped destroy everything and put it back together, find the right balance. I think we did pretty well in that way.
You said you have a classical background. Did you play any on the album?
A little bit but I didn't have any good instruments. I just have this tiny viola. I tried but it didn't sound that good. It would need a big one. So that's my big goal for the next record is to do the string arrangements. Or at least put them through a lot of crazy effects.
The vocals on the album... they were recorded in France, at your grandmother's house?
Yeah at this house on the beach in the French Riviera which is heaven on earth. Not in summer when everybody is on holiday there, but in the Spring. But the house is being sold right now, it's pretty sad, so I had to go there to do it, one last time. I also needed the isolation. I'm so self conscious, singing in a room with people”.
I want to end up with a couple of reviews for the wonderful Melody’s Echo Chamber. It is coming up for its tenth anniversary. Displaying the clear and stunning talent of Melody Prochet, this is an album that you need to hear. This is what AllMusic wrote about Melody’s Echo Chamber:
“The name Melody's Echo Chamber doesn't particularly roll off the tongue, but it does a fine job of preparing you for what you're going to hear on their self-titled album. Melody is Melody Prochet, the songwriter/singer behind the band, true, but the record is also coated in layer after layer of sweetly sung melodies -- "Echo Chamber" thanks to the homespun weirdness of Tame Impala's Kevin Parker and his effects-drenched, very echoey production. Cute tricks with their name aside, what Prochet and Parker have come up with here is music that follows in the tradition of art pop groups like Broadcast and Stereolab, borrowing their use of sound and structure to give their ultra-catchy songs loads of sonic depth and texture. Every song on Melody's Echo Chamber plays with sound and space, sometimes stripping things back and leaving space between the instruments, sometimes covering everything with a heavy blanket of reverb and fuzz. Parker is a whiz at each approach and his drum sounds are absolutely perfect throughout. Within the shifting arrangements and sounds, there is the consistent sound of Prochet's light and breezy voice. Even though it sometimes feels like she could drift away in a light wind, she anchors the songs with simple and direct vocal melodies that keep the songs out of the realm of mere experiments with sound. Even the trickiest tunes, like the bossa nova-space pop hybrid "Quand Vas Tu Rentrer?" and the uneasy listening "Snowcapped Andes Crash" (on which the duo gets extremely trippy) are tethered by her voice. The combination of Parker's inspired production, Prochet's lovely singing and evocative songwriting, and the perfect balance the duo strikes between pop and art makes Melody's Echo Chamber a rather stunning debut”.
NME provided a very positive and interesting take on Melody’s Echo Chamber. I did not experience the album in 2012. It is one that I discovered and listened to first relatively recently:
“Welcome to the court of 2012’s psychedelic king and queen. As the leader of Tame Impala and sometime contributor to Pond, The Dee Dee Dums, Mink Mussel Creek and other Perth-based bands, Kevin Parker has installed himself as this generation’s retro-psych regent by playing a brand of ’60s psychedelia most had given up for dead.
Now he’d like you to meet his girlfriend, Melody Prochet – a classically trained musician from the French countryside who moved to Paris, discovered rock music and, as the cosmos dictated, got talking to Parker backstage at a Tame show. Soon enough she was in Australia, unfurling her diabetically sweet melodies in Parker’s personal studio.
But while Tame’s bejewelled new record ‘Lonerism’ had a specific date-line in mind – summer 1966, The Beatles making the transition from ‘Rain’ to ‘Revolver’ – Melody’s Echo Chamber is less bound by big names. It’s in thrall to the past, sure, but to lesser-known music like Pentangle and Comus; to stuff that occupies the forever-French hinterland between musique concrète, Serge Gainsbourg’s thing, jazz and Muzak. The stuff that Stereolab brought back into the Anglo-Saxon world in the ’90s; ideas that Broadcast ran with.
When Melody’s light-saturated first single ‘Crystallized’ rolled into our Twitter feeds back in March, it was easy to dismiss the shimmery-shiny song as standard blog-bait. But ‘Melody’s Echo Chamber’ manages to create something just as dark as it is light.
‘Snowcapped Andes Crash’ not only has a title that could’ve fallen off the back of Radiohead’s ‘Amnesiac’, it also pushes Melody’s stilted, reverb-caked guitar arpeggios towards ‘Knives Out’ territory, before breaking back towards the safety of the Cocteau Twins. ‘Quand Vas Tu Renter?’ takes the bizarre keyboard tone childhood Casio users will recognise as ‘dog bark’ and pushes it into an uneasy clinch with spy jazz. Then, if things start to drift off into the lazy, stoner-y drone that Tame Impala fans will know only too well, she isn’t afraid to try something weird to snap out of it. ‘IsThatWhatYouSaid’, for instance: a backwards-tracking squall that’s like flying an aeroplane through a flock of guitars.
What it all adds up to isn’t big-push psych loonycakes like The Flaming Lips, but something more subtly disorienting. The
‘echo chamber’ name comes from Melody sitting in her bedroom, making a sort of den, and blurting out her tunes to no-one but a hard drive. It’s that sense of intruding on a private moment that Parker and Prochet have managed to retain. After all, here are two people who already see the best in each other, and with ‘Melody’s Echo Chamber’ they’ve tried to make everyone else see it too. It shows”.
Go and listen to the remarkable Melody’s Echo Chamber if you are not aware of the album. With Prochet putting out the third studio album, Emotional Eternal, this year, let’s hope there is a lot more to come from her. There were some very warm reviews for Melody’s Echo Chamber - but some were not entirely convinced. It does require more airplay and affection. Very shortly into the opening track its true beauty and strength…
WILL be revealed.