Review
Genre and Mood
Kungs and Luke Pritchard’s Melody opens Layers, an album that French Wikipedia says mixes pop, rock, funk and soul, by a producer whose style has been labelled anything from pop house and happy house to deep house and future house. Pop and house, then, with an indie rock voice on top: the page calls it upbeat and catchy, as a track named Melody that opens a debut should be.
Song Summary
Melody is the first track of Layers, the debut studio album of the French DJ and producer Kungs, released in France by House of Barclay on 4 November 2016. Kungs and Pritchard wrote it together, and Kungs produced it. The YouTube upload, provided by Universal Music, spells out the split: Pritchard is vocalist, composer and lyricist; Kungs is composer, producer, programmer, engineer and mixing engineer. It is not one of the album’s four singles, so it lives as the record’s opening statement.
Musical Breakdown
Main Section
No review we could find describes Melody part by part, so this page describes less than usual. The sources give its people and its place: a Kooks singer’s voice over Kungs’ production, four minutes and two seconds at the head of a twelve-track album. Listen for where the rock singer and the house producer meet.
Concepts in Focus
Pritchard is the <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist, credited after Kungs. French Wikipedia counts eleven different voices on Layers and names this collaboration with the singer of The Kooks as one of them. The album was built on guests: Cookin’ on 3 Burners and Kylie Auldist on This Girl, Jamie N Commons on Don’t You Know, and Ephemerals on I Feel So Bad, which samples Ephemerals, Wolfgang Valbrun – You Made Us Change.
The album’s credits also show mixing as the producer’s own job: Kungs did the programming, engineering and mixing, with additional mixing and mastering by Rainer Rütsch. On a record like this the balance between voice and beat is the producer’s decision from start to finish.
Artistic Context
Kungs is Valentin Brunel, born in Toulon in 1996. He chose a Latvian word for mister as his name, started on a djembe at five, and grew up with his father’s rock records, among them The Who and The Kooks. The Kooks, in which Pritchard sings and plays guitar, are an English indie rock band formed in Brighton in 2004, whose 2006 debut Inside In/Inside Out went five times platinum in Britain. Kungs broke through in 2016 with This Girl, which reached number one in France, Germany and Switzerland.
Impact and Reception
Layers reached number eight in France, and in February 2017 it won the Victoire de la musique for electronic or dance album of the year, against Jean-Michel Jarre’s Electronica 2 and Justice’s Woman. Melody is where it begins. Press play.
