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 Scott Creney

Melody’s Echo Chamber – S/T (Fat Possum)

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By Scott Creney

The album has a shiny roughness, laser blades shooting off the walls. MEC communicates a violent psychedelic softness, an auditory feast, Broadcast and Goldfrapp awkwardly making out in the filthy janitor’s closet of the candy store.

The songs  move in circular song structures — like blood, like orbits — that ebb and flow in their intensity, a soft cacophony, a billion barely perceptible orgasms at once. It takes you nowhere, in a tangible sense, while traveling a universe of the ephemeral. MEC observes its surroundings at a sub-molecular level, a shattering of nuclei into strings.

Guitars dissolve in smudged razors, pushpins hidden in your lipstick. There may or may not be a horror show lurking within your candyfloss.

A shopping mall filled with the terminally ill, a sandwich consisting of nothing but holes. Every escort is covered in fleas. Homeless animals must be sprayed for lice. A taste for hedonistic pleasure offset by the distant echo of your conscience, the aftermath of your failed threesome, dried semen and snoring, still the outsider, always the outsider.

Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker produced the record, and it shows. Sounds are processed through effects within an inch of their life, creating a weird hybrid of natural/artificial, traditional/electronic. How good it feels to wiggle out from under the weight of history, the tradition of top-town meaning. Death to authority. Burn the new Beatles boxset.

I thought Laurel Halo had made the best psychedelic/electronic album of the year. I was wrong, and God how I love to be wrong.

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