Echo Park (album)

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Echo Park

Studio album by Feeder

Released

April 23, 2001

Recorded

2000

Genre

Indie rock

Length

45:23

Professional reviews

Feeder chronology

Yesterday Went Too Soon
(1999)

Echo Park
(2001)

Swim Re-surfaced
(2001)

Echo Park is the third studio album from the British alternative rock band Feeder, released in April 2001 on Echo. The album's upbeat and sometimes dark subject material, featuring references to summer, relationships, turning the clock back, and its much more commercial sound in comparison to previous albums, helped the album become a commercial success due to selling more copies than expected, gaining the band their first ever sales award and the recouping of the album's budget. Echo Park was Feeder's breakthrough album, with first single "Buck Rogers" making the UK top 5.

Feeder released three UK singles from Echo Park, "Buck Rogers", "Seven Days in the Sun" and "Turn" with "Piece By Piece" released in Europe only. The UK singles all made the top 40 of the UK singles chart. The album itself reached #5 on the UK Albums Chart; an unexpected success for the band at the time of recording.

Echo Park has continued to sell consistently well for its first three years, and in 2003 was certified platinum by the BPI. A 2005 readers vote in Kerrang! ranked Echo Park as the 25th best British rock album of all time.

The voice heard at the beginning of the track "Standing On The Edge" is that of Matt Sime who is a friend of the band. He played keyboards on tour from 2000 - 2001, and also their festival appearances of 2002.

1 Background
2 Release
3 Music
- 3.1 Content
- 3.2 Sales
4 Chart performance
5 Track listing
6 Accolade
7 References

[edit] Background

Following their highly regarded and minor commercially successful 1999 album Yesterday Went Too Soon, the band appeared at the Manic Millennium concert at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, South Wales supporting fellow Welsh band the Manic Street Preachers before a headline show at the London Astoria the following year. During this time Grant Nicholas, the group's frontman and principal songwriter, began to write new material for a future album, with songs such as "Buck Rogers", "Seven Days" and "Belmish" emerging through the course of the year.^[1] Versions of the newly composed songs (except for "Belmish", which didn't make the final cut and a few others that did) were performed many times during the course of 2000 at various festivals such as V2000 (in which "Oxygen" was performed, and broadcast on MTV UK), the Glastonbury festival and T in the Park, before the band then headed off on a mini-tour playing small venues in December.

During the summer of the same year, Feeder began to finalise the songs demos while on breaks from touring. The band headed to the Milton Keynes recording studio Great Lindford Manor, which comprises a family living upstairs and the studio downstairs. They recorded at the studio with producer Gil Norton working alongside the band.

Grant said in an interview that there were periods of time in which there was friction between him and the band, but said that despite the occasional arguments they still remained good friends,^[2] and continued to work with the band on their next two studio albums.

[edit] Release

Echo Park was released in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2001. Before the albums release, "Seven Days in the Sun" charted at #14 in the UK charts, and "Buck Rogers" already got the band into the British public's awareness. The album entered the UK album charts at #5 and then went gold which was at the time considered an unexpected success for the band, as it was their first ever sales award of any kind,^[3] and were in danger of splitting up if the album didn't sell, in which Grant said at the time in a Melody Maker interview, "It's the same with any band. That's just the way the music business is. There is only a certain amount of money a label will put into a band. I'm just being realistic. We've been around for seven or eight years and I am not planning on giving up, but we're putting everything into this record and I'm just hoping that people like it".^[4]

In July 2001 Echo released "Turn" as the third UK single to be taken directly from the album. The single reached #27 on the UK Singles Chart. It was the last single from the album, but "Just a Day" a b-side from "Seven Days in the Sun" was released in December of that year, and made #12 in the charts.^[5]

[edit] Music

Echo Park features a varied mix of musical styles. While most of the tracks are fast with "We Can't Rewind" showing aggression, and demonstrate the change in direction to more of a commercial approach, other songs such as "Piece By Piece", "Satellite News", "Turn" and "Oxygen" reveal a quieter, slower and more melodic temperament. With Echo Park, the band began to incorporate further instruments into their sound. Many tracks feature the use of Moog synthesizers, in which Grant experimented with them during the albums recording, in an attempt to create various sounds he felt could work on the record. The opening track "Standing on the Edge" is seen by Grant as the most experimental track on the album, as he experimented with moogs for most of the track and used them on the recording, the band also recorded it themselves and uses different moods throughout. The closing track "Bug" is one they recorded live in the studio, and uses more of dirty-sounding riffs than most tracks on the record.

[edit] Content

The lyrical themes explored on Echo Park range from that of relationships on "Buck Rogers", to the idea of turning the clock back wanting to change the past on "Turn" and emotional feelings on "Piece By Piece". The two songs both employ dark moods in the lyrics, with "Oxygen" and "Satellite News" also with a similar approach. The lyrical emotions are usually suited to the mood of the music.

[edit] Sales

Following its release, Echo Park sold steadily in the UK, and broke shipments of 100,000 after six weeks.^[3] By August 2003, the album passed 300,000 units to be certified platinum after it's successor Comfort in Sound also gained the same sales status certificate.^[3]