Review Summary: a mesmerizing opportunity to melt under sunny psychedelic skies
The spirit of the flower child has taken root yet again well into the accelerating chaos of the 21st century, coopting the frenetic energy of a madly spinning world and transmogrifying it into a resplendent floral display blooming in euphoric fractals across a blissful white background. If you’ve seen
Midsommar, this is the idyllic pagan lifestyle that could have been if things had never turned south: if the sun refused to set on the clean cohesive linens of a communal paradise dotted with wildflowers. So many masterpieces have been made detailing the dark side of psychedelia, dating back to the 13th floor elevators (or even Hector Berlioz and his opium nightmares in Symphonie Fantistique). That seems to be where artists take the deepest liberties in stretching the possibilities of any given medium, embracing the expansion all the more if the resultant shapes became grotesque and confusing. Anthems of love tend to take a dryer, simplistic, and grounded tone. Melody Prochet makes no such sacrifices in her positive sentiments, melting the listener like hot wax while declaring love to be no subtle feeling. This album reinvigorates an Echo Canyon commitment to peace and sends it swirling through cotton candy skies, reaching into the pungent, thick bag of tricks used by darker psych acts and nurturing those textures until they dance joyfully of their own accord. Melody apparently travelled from the city to the more peaceful french alps to produce this work with the help of some friends. It is my understanding from what I hear on the record, that the French Alps receive more sunny days than not; any drop of rain that falls in Melody’s path vaporizes momentarily in a land where fire dances across the sky in eternal, transcendent celebration. It cohesive, mesmerizing warmth is perhaps its only drawback as a single larger work. The entire project works as an arrival: an escape of triviality. A guru in the shape of a loving mother, telling you that the butterflies in your stomach are an exuberant reminder of your own vitality, and will cause you no harm. However, for all of that euphoria, it doesn’t truly serve to take the listener on much of a journey. Starting everything off, the title track “Emotional Eternal” does have a rising action to it, but could serve as a climactic moment in any other album, a feature that almost all of these tracks share. The album takes a subtly darker turn at the end, slightly emulating the reintegration of doubt that occurs as an enlightening psychedelic experience fades away but, for the most part, we end where we’ve begun. The flow across the project is achieved less by its sequence and construction than by its potent, hypnotic consistency. Perhaps there could have been more drama and resolution to seize the listener and keep us all guessing. Perhaps to want that is to miss the meditative wonder it offers. Either way, I anticipate this album being a regular fallback this year for long, destination-less drives and momentous walks to the park as the days grow long and the spring makes way for a more hopeful summer.
