On her latest Melody’s Echo Chamber album, Unclouded, gentle Gallic psychedelicist, Melody Prochet wastes absolutely no time in setting out her stall, making clear her chosen style right from the first bars of opening track “The House That Doesn’t Exist”. Featuring spaced out, dream pop sounds with airy, helium-tinged vocals, a shuffling groove and an orchestral backing – and it’s, without a doubt, a beautiful accompaniment to drifting off into the distant stratosphere.
Prochet has released three previous albums in her Melody’s Echo Chamber guise, some to great acclaim – particularly the self-titled debut from 2012 – and as with earlier releases, Unclouded boasts an impressive crew of collaborators, from Dungen’s Reine Fiske and the Heliocentrics’ Malcolm Catto to co-producer and composer Sven Wunder. Despite the talent available, however, it soon becomes apparent that the tunes on this disc, except for the instrumental title track, are largely interchangeable with hardly any discernible differences between them.
The drumbeats may slide from a trip-hop groove to something rather more jazz inflected or a bit of additional colour may come from a flute solo or by some bowed strings. Ultimately, any variations between songs such as “Eyes Closed”, “Memory’s Underground” and “Into Shadows” are all marginal though. That is until the penultimate “Unclouded”, where sampled sounds of waves crashing on a rocky shore are accompanied by trippy harp sounds and orchestral strings. Yet even this is hardly a major volte-face and the lack of variation on this album eventually leads to its sounds fading unobtrusively into the background.
It is often said that many double albums could be radically improved by enough judicious editing to reduce it to a single disc recording. Unclouded, however, could easily be reduced to a 7” format with the title track on one side and pretty much any one of the other tracks on the reverse.
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