Album of the Week: Melody’s Echo Chamber – Unclouded
Staff Review
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, relatively brief record, Prochet and Wunder, with great brevity, distil a myriad of interests to conjure an elegant, timeless iteration of psychedelia. On 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.
Melody’s Echo Chamber – Unclouded is out now on vinyl & CD
On her fourth album, Unclouded, Melody’s Echo Chamber embarks on a life-affirming new chapter with an album that celebrates the present moment, whatever state we find ourselves in. There’s a continuity that runs through Melody’s Echo Chamber’s brand of psychedelic pop going back to 2012’s self-titled debut but now comes a perfectly executed shaking up of personnel.
Unclouded’s impressive cast includes Swedish maestro Sven Wunder, who co-produced the record and contributed to the writing, bringing his unique sonic palette to the richly-textured canvas; Josefin Runsteen on strings, who brings her avant-garde smarts to the tableau; Dina Ögon’s Daniel Ögen on guitar and Love Orsan on bass who Melody describes as “masters of the velvet groove”; British drummer Malcolm Catto, collaborator with Madlib and DJ Shadow, and the powerhouse behind The Heliocentrics; and frequent collaborator Reine Fiske whose guitar parts can be heard throughout the record.
Last but not least, Leon Michels – the Wu-Tang, The Carters, Norah Jones and Clairo collaborator – worked with Melody on the album’s closer “Daisy”, a sparkling pop song plucked from the ether. El Michels Affair’s Grammy-winning mixer Jens Jungkurth was drafted in to bring everything to life.
