Album Review: Melody's Echo Chamber by Melody's Echo Chamber

The name Melody Prochet might not mean a great deal to anyone outside of her native Paris. Having spent 12 years studying classical music it wasn't until the age of 19 that Prochet discovered avant garde pop and psychedelia. Brief but ultimately fruitless spells fronting the relatively unknown Narcoleptic Dancers and My Bee's Garden followed suit. It was during a spate of shows with the latter supporting Tame Impala that Prochet first encountered Kevin Parker, and after handing him a demo of her previous band's recordings, the relationship blossomed both in and out of the studio.

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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.

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It’s hard not to tie the music of Melody’s Echo Chamber to a season. The moniker for Parisian Melody Prochet first gained notice this past summer with the kind of blissed-out sunny psych that’s become blog-bait these days. Heck, there’s a song called “Endless Shore” on her self-titled debut that sounds like a wave crashing against itself in slow-motion.

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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.

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Melody's Echo ChamberMelody's Echo Chamber[Fat Possum; 2012]By Colin Joyce; October 1, 2012Purchase at: Insound (Vinyl) | Amazon (MP3 & CD) | iTunes | MOGEach decade, it seems, there’s a new torchbearer for technicolor, kraut-indebted, electronic-inflected female fronted guitar pop. Twenty years ago saw the rise of Stereolab. A chance meeting at a gig between French singer Laetitia Sadier and the Marxist-minded McCarthy guitarist Tim Gane saw rise to an incredibly fruitful songwriting partnership that outlasted both McCarthy and, if you’re counting recent collaborations, Stereolab itself.

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At a Tame Impala show in Paris two years ago, Melody Prochet, French pop aficionado and multi-instrumentalist for the band My Bee's Garden, became intrigued by the Aussie psych-rockers' scuzzy sonics. She struck up a conversation with the band's Kevin Parker after the show about how he achieved the band's signature, blown-out bass sound in particular, and a while later he asked My Bee's Garden to support Tame Impala on a European leg of their tour. Though her own band's sound was clean and somewhat precious, Prochet remained drawn to the Tame Impala aesthetic.

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Within the first few moments of Melody Prochet’s eponymous solo debut (released under the moniker of Melody’s Echo Chamber), it’s clear that there’s something special about this French performer. Formerly of the Narcoleptic Dancers and My Bee’s Garden, the singer decides to explore fully her psychedelic dream pop interests here, and the results are majorly intriguing and endearing. Although it’s a bit inconsistent and inaccessible, her inimitable combination of density and delicacy somewhat make up for the flaws.

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The debut album from Melody's Echo Chamber has sunny, melodic rock and pop at its core, with a dizzying array of orbiting elements that serve equally to enhance the basic theme and to throw your equilibrium into wicked disarray. Full immersion is recommended but keep one hand on the rail at all times. .

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The combination of fuzzed-out guitars and breathy, girlish vocals is by now an almost devalued musical currency, but this debut, a collaboration from Parisian singer Melody Prochet's and Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, is a dream-pop album with some heft. Crystallised, in particular, kicks into a deeply satisfying psych-rock crunch halfway through - a reverb-heavy, robust foil for Prochet's feathery voice. But for much of the unfocused second half of the album, their sounds stray into Stereolab-lite, especially with the wafty to the point of enervated stylings of Bisou Magique.

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Formerly of The Narcoleptic Dancers and My Bee’s Garden, Melody Prochet has embraced dream pop with Melody’s Echo Chamber project. The classically trained Parisian recruited Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker to produce her debut under that name, making those closed-eye visions a reality. Lead single/opener “I Follow You” begins with simple, sun-drenched ’60s melodies and ambling guitars before descending into a psychedelic swirl that recalls Parker’s day job.

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There was a time when being a multi-instrumentalist was a special skill set, honed only by the finest of musicians. That a 17-year-old Prince produced, arranged, composed and played all 27 instruments on his 1978 debut album used to be considered quite a feat. Nowadays, he'd be considered within the norm (“just the 27 instruments, you say?”), as each new month spews another slew of offerings from multi-instrumentalists with capacious bedrooms and well-thumbed copies of 'GarageBand For Dummies'.

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A shimmering, lovely thing, this debut is also full of adventurous spirit. James Skinner 2012 Melody’s Echo Chamber is the project of classically trained French multi-instrumentalist Melody Prochet, and an aptly named one too. Her debut album is a shimmering, lovely thing: a psychedelic gauze through which traces of dream-pop and shoegaze reverberate.

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Let’s be honest; when you think of the term ‘muse’, you probably don’t automatically assume that said muse is ever male. After all, in Hellenistic mythology, the Muses were the Goddesses of creative inspiration. In modern music and art, we only hear about female muses: Sedgwick/Warhol, Smith/Mapplethorpe, Moss/Klein etc. But with Melody Prochet’s debut as Melody’s Echo Chamber, she has found a muse in Tame Impala frontman, Kevin Parker.

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Melody’s Echo Chamber is Paris-residing musician Melody Prochet’s trippy dream-pop solo project. And it’s aptly named: In an interview, she revealed that name came from a dream she had where her “bedroom’s acoustics changed into infinite echo mode.”The album that resulted from this abstract head space has a distorted shoegaze feel, which can be attributed to the assistance of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on production and recording. Parker helped to fuzz up Prochet’s tidy chords, a product of her being trained in classical music, which she has repeatedly described in interviews as an experience so intense that she eventually grew sick of it.

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Calexico Calexico, the proudly Southwestern band from Arizona led by the guitarist and singer Joey Burns and the drummer John Convertino, left home to record “Algiers” (Anti-), an album named after the neighborhood where it was recorded: a neighborhood of New Orleans across the Mississippi from ….

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