Bleeding Rainbow

Yeah Right starts with a six minuter called Go Ahead that I believe really embodies what not only the album, but the band is all about.

My initial reaction to the song was that Bleeding Rainbow is going to be some sort of quaint girl-with-an-all-boy-band sort of thing. Head girl, Sarah Everton’s soft vocals float into a sort of 90s guitar pattern as a steady drum lightly contributes a beat to the cloudy, delay heavy ambience. This sort of first impression matches perfectly to how I felt about the band when I first read up on them. A band once called Reading Rainbow, fronted by a husband/wife duo… just that combination gave me the impression that Bleeding Rainbow might just be reduced to background music for cleaning my room to. Then the song picks up.

It escalates further and further to the point where the ambience becomes distortion, the light beats become heavy cymbal crashes and the band that I thought were pussyfooting around sugar pop transforms into link-sharing worthy music. It’s almost as if Bleeding Rainbow wanted to trick us into thinking they were the goodie-two shoes that reviewers make them out to be, just to immediately prove them wrong. I loved the rest of the album that much more knowing that they pulled the wool over my eyes at first.

In a chat with Interview magazine, Everton justifies that initial mindset a lot of listeners might have, “If I heard about a band that was, like, a two-piece that was a boy and a girl and they’re married and they’re adorable, I would never want to listen to that band!” But Bleeding Rainbow spend the next ten songs saying “fuck you” to anyone who lumped them into that genre of typically lite married bands.

Waking Dream has got to be my favorite track on the album for this reason. It sort of embodies that moment when you’re watching a band live for the first time and the chorus kicks in and you look over at your friend like “wowholyshit”. Just as you settle in to the initial delicacy of the track, they rip into the unfamiliar and you feel the switch from just listening to fully engaging.

The way that Bleeding Rainbow continuously toys with your impression of them throughout the album is really what kept me with them. They set you up then tear you down to the point where you’re not trying to figure out what they are anymore, you’re just on board for whatever they give you next.

kaninerecords.com

bleeding-rainbow.tumblr.com

Ali Haberstroh