Melody's Echo Chamber – Bon Voyage
French musician Melody Prochet's second album as Melody's Echo Chamber, Bon Voyage is wildly inconsistent
After suffering a serious accident last year – shortly following the announcement of new album Bon Voyage and an accompanying tour – Melody Prochet was left hospitalised for months. The release of the album, Prochet’s second as Melody’s Echo Chamber, was subsequently put on hold, along with the tour dates being cancelled. Now that she's fully recovered though, the album is being given its release.
Bon Voyage is not an easy listen by any count, and it probably isn’t meant to be. A collaborative record between Prochet, Dungen’s Reine Fiske and The Amazing’s Fredrik Swahn, Prochet deals with a lot of dark themes lyrically, covering loneliness, feelings of lack of self-worth and general discontentment with life. However, it really feels like an album of two very distant halves.
Opener Cross My Heart begins sounding very much like Prochet’s previous work, all jangly 60s psych-pop guitars and whispered vocals, but soon descends into what can only be described as madness, featuring vinyl scratching, pan pipes and some questionable vocal sampling. Desert Horse follows in much the same pattern, but with even more bizarre production elements thrown in, from ear-piercing screams to disturbingly robotic auto-tuned vocals.
The closing trio of tracks – Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Neige, Shirim, and Visions of Someone Special, On a Wall of Reflections – are the album’s saving grace. While still not particularly overwhelming, they are at least well-formed and display the only moments of clarity on an otherwise wildly inconsistent album.
Listen to: Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Neige, Shirim