The Babe Rainbow - Double Rainbow - 17/07/2018

Is there any other band which rocks so gentle? The Babe Rainbow’s psychedelia isn’t about bone-crunching riffs but that floating feeling. Telling you this, three tracks in ‘Gladly’ has its listener leaning back eyes-closed, totally relaxed and in the moment as the music washes over. 

The Babe Rainbow is a Byron outfit, but like many of their peers on label Flightless have found a footing overseas. But back to the sound. It just kind of flows.

‘The Magician’ drifts in as a moment of beautiful confusion and joy. The lighter shade of a cosmic jam drifting on a soft cloud of laid-back George Harrison. Halfway between flying in space and down here on earth rolling stoned. Sometimes it’s touched with a hint of melancholy. Perhaps not intentional, maybe it just comes out that way.

They’re a mood band. Chasing feeling when everyone else is making statements. Get your head around that or perhaps just check it out and maybe dig it.

There was a review written in this space last week about another group. It talked about their whole album happening within a moment of The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields’. Ditto. This one’s at 3:14 but listening to ‘Supermoon’ maybe it’s somewhere in ‘Blue Jay Way’ yet then… at times it kind of shambles like early Stones. Just as equally Double Rainbow leaves an impression that it could have slid down forward from the sky daydreaming on a sunny afternoon. Before you can think on it too long ‘Eureka’ marshals the funk.
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This record breathes something new to its listener’s world. It cruises. Maybe there’s points where the band itself doesn’t even know what it’s jamming, but rainbows are beautiful aren’t they just? Sometimes you just look at them and that’s that, it all just comes together. You walk into the rest of the day a smile painted. 
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Words by Riley Fitzgerald   
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