Melody’s Echo Chamber
Emotional Eternal
DOMINO
There’s one particularly special song on the new Melody’s Echo Chamber album. “Alma,” named for Melody Prochet’s daughter, is a celebration of birth and rebirth, a jubilant impetus and sweeping final movement. “I’m so happy and so proud,” she beams against suspended chords and bountiful strings, temporarily ditching her maternal tongue to share this joyous feeling unequivocally, veritably a shout-from-the-rooftops moment. Without “Alma”—and without Alma—2018’s Bon Voyage would have announced not a sojourn but a permanent goodbye, for it was on the first night away from her newborn daughter, searching for a way to alleviate her anxiety and expel emotion, that Prochet conceived the cathartic first song from her third album, Emotional Eternal.
Soon thereafter, Prochet reassembled her co-writing/co-producing duo of Fredrik Swahn and Reine Fiske—with whom she worked on Bon Voyage—and headed to Stockholm. Here, they experimented with the EBow guitar techniques of Sigur Rós, the long-necked lutes (or bağlama) of Ottoman classical music, the Mellotron of her Middle England muse Broadcast, and the theta waves of her partner’s pervasive meditation music. The result is more contained than her previous album—a whirlpool of psychedelia and pointed Tropicália complete with incongruous Auto-Tune and Swedish screaming—and more sophisticated than her spirited echo-pop debut. Clarity permeates every track on Emotional Eternal. The songs breathe. One is even titled “A Slow Dawning of Peace,” an apt summation of one’s listening experience.
Part of Eternal’s modesty comes from space—space from Prochet’s previous work but also that accorded by the natural sanctuaries in which she goes to find solace and foil disillusionment. “When something disenchanting happened I would take refuge near my house on the peninsula under the pines, a natural sanctuary where I sent wishes to the shore, I was soothed by its beauty,” she said of “Personal Message,” exemplifying her peaceful relationship with the earth and contemplative and unhurried approach to life and creation. “I need the space of mind,” she sings on “Looking Backward,” a song inspired by a man at the airport using his watch to reflect sunlight in creative ways. It’s this attention to subtlety that makes her music purgative, providing us with space, and redirecting life’s meaning toward uncomplicated details.
Like Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier before her, Prochet’s vocal language vacillates between French and English. The extra layer of privacy allows her to delve into more personal feelings and experimental imagery. On “Pyramids in the Clouds”—the only song sung exclusively in French—she sings of black water, wildflowers, and reappearing islands, tethering herself to nature but drip-feeding abstract vignettes. “The Hypnotist” prompts comparison to Cassandra Jenkins with a compassionate pep talk that roughly translates thus: “Ten, nine, eight, you close your eyes, you breathe / Seven, six, you descend the stairs into darkness / Five, you are in the cedar forest, you are fine.” This language barrier also allows for our attention to remain not only on the lyrics, but on the way the words sound. The music can pass through us and around us without demanding inadvertent lyrical analysis.
Melody is motivated by amelioration—nature, love, tranquility. She’s uninterested in turning her sonic solace into a business, ignoring the conveyor-belt-like release schedules of the industry, and creating chiefly for herself. This approach invites us to slow down and live more deliberately, for Melody may never give us another album—we were lucky to get this one. It’s worth our attention and will reward us for as long as we lend it.
