Review Summary: Curios vs. Recyclables
If you’re familiar with Melody Prochet’s more recent work, it should take only a few seconds of “Pêcheuse De Lune” to realize that
Unfold will be nothing like 2022’s
Emotional Eternal. Instead of the latter’s stripped down instrumentals and airy atmosphere, you’re immediately greeted with a blast of fuzzed-out psychedelic rock, complete with hypnotic drawn-out power chords and trippy melodies. But it all becomes a bit more clear when researching the record’s backstory: rather than being a continuation of
Emotional Eternal, this succinct collection of tunes has been described as some sort of “lost” second album by both Prochet and the music press. Unfortunately, the further we dive into this rabbithole, the more it becomes apparent that it’s just (at least presumably) some sort of marketing move to drum up interest; in reality, all we get are a whopping THREE new songs in this seven-song tracklist. The rest of the tracks come from the 2016 EP
From Pink They Fell Into Blue, just with a few altered song titles to (again, presumably) create the illusion of giving us new songs. I hate to dwell on this detail for so long, but it’s a bit crummy to bill a new record as some sort of long-lost collection of “unheard” tracks, when in reality only a few songs are actually… well, unheard.
But let’s pretend that this pesky little 2016 EP doesn’t exist, and we’re judging
Unfold purely on the merits of the tracks it contains. How does everything fare? Pretty damn well. As far as Prochet’s small discography goes, the self-titled debut album is definitely the closest point of comparison here. Much of the material fuses elements of neo-psychedelia, dream pop, psych-pop, and the occasional nod to shoegaze; in fact, the aforementioned “Pêcheuse De Lune” is the only song that really rocks as hard as it does. “Pieces of Sound” and “The Cure” are compelling exercises in merging electronic and organic elements, as warped percussion loops are combined with live instrumentation to create a trippy vibe; meanwhile, “Ocean Road” makes effective use of Prochet’s washed-out vocal lines, as they compliment the droning guitar lines beneath. If
Unfold proves anything, it’s that even the leftovers of our French songstress can be turned into something compelling and mesmerizing; the few original tunes we
do get on this record are certainly an example of such. But again, it’s just a shame that we couldn’t hear more of these songs; in the six - yes, six - years between the debut album and
Bon Voyage I have to imagine that other original cuts were still left in the Melody’s Echo Chamber vault. Well, I suppose we at least got a new studio album from Prochet this year… that’s still gotta count for something, right?
