Album of the Week: Melody’s Echo Chamber – Unclouded
Melody’s Echo Chamber, the solo project of French musician Melody Prochet, first grabbed our attention (and likely many others) with her Kevin Parker produced self-titled album back in 2012. The psychedelic pop and rock of Melody’s Echo Chamber have remained a constant across Prochet’s subsequent releases, though adjacent psych-pop genres have increasingly been explored.
On her new album, Unclouded, released this week via Domino Records, Prochet enlists producer Sven Wunder, leading to a collaboration that casts her work in a new light. Across this breezy, pocket-sized record, Prochet and Wunder, with great brevity, distil a myriad of interests to conjure an elegant, timeless iteration of psychedelia. One that is lilting, drifting, and gently yet persistently swaying.
Throughout Unclouded, influences drawn from ’60s French pop, funk, jazz, shoegaze, Tropicalia, dream-pop, and ’90s chill-out coalesce into a cohesive, enveloping sonic world. Highlights are plentiful, including Eyes Closed, where Prochet’s airy vocals glide over breakbeat rhythms, subtly phased guitars, and swirling synthesized textures. Elsewhere, the jazzy inflections of Childhood Dream, the longest track here at a mere 3:17, create an evocative, transportive passage. The twinkling keys, restless rhythms, and sublime woodwinds of Burning Man, along with the pensive, Krautrock-ish energy of Into Shadows, are similarly impressive cuts.
Listeners will no doubt detect echoes of fellow retro-voyagers Broadcast’s early material, as well as the work of like-minded psychonaut Jane Weaver. Yet in many ways, the contemporaneous record Unclouded perhaps resembles the most is Clairo’s excellent Charm (2024), a connection made crystal clear when El Michels Affair appear on the shimmering album closer, Daisy.
Like Charm, Unclouded demonstrates a deep appreciation for the warmth of what is presumably mostly vintage, analogue equipment. The instrumental choices and production techniques give the album a fluid, tactile quality that feels utterly timeless and classic.
Recommended for fans of Clairo, Aoife Nessa Frances, Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Weaver, Broadcast, Stereolab.
