Bleeding Rainbow is a hard-working band. They don't live solely off of their music as evidenced by singer/bassist Sarah Everton's Twitter missives about pulling shifts at a coffee shop in Philadelphia. Catch the band on tour, and more than likely you'll find them in a basement or at a venue where the beers cost less than $3. They also don't take any shit from anyone. For further evidence, look at their online dustup from a year ago with a writer from a certain taste-maker website. They work hard, and they stand behind what they produce. They're a Philly band, after all.
With Interrupt, their second full-length under the Bleeding Rainbow moniker (previously the band was a two piece comprised of Everton and Rob Garcia and went by the name Reading Rainbow) and their second on Kanine, the band has seemingly gone back to basics in the best sense of the word. Seeing the band in a live setting over the last year, their setlist has been almost all tracks from Interrupt or deep cuts from the Reading Rainbow days. The result has been a blistering wallop of noise, guitar, and earnestness.
Refreshingly, those elements are also at play over the course of the ten tracks on Interrupt. It's a very unfussy album compared to last year's Yeah Right. Many of the hazier, drawn-out qualities of that album have been stripped away, and the ten tracks here clock in at a breezy 34 minutes. Tracks such as "Start Again" and "Time and Place" find the band in top form deploying hard charging, guitar-driven numbers that recall early '90s grunge while also managing to sound fresh in 2014. In talking with us, guitarist Rob Garcia mentioned wanting to streamline the band's process some and "get more to the point." By zeroing, the band conjures up some earworm jams. Tracks like "Cut Up" and "So You Know" are the sort of songs that get stuck in your head and linger for days at a time.
Genre labels can be a fool's errand, and Bleeding Rainbow kind of gets the short end of the stick as far as that goes. Yeah, there's hooky guitar at times but it's not really "garage" as it's a bit too polished and the songs are longer than two minutes. There are layers of guitar at times and a softer, cooed vocals but it's not really "shoegaze" either. Although, if it's late enough at night then such as "Monochrome" and "Phase" do recall My Bloody Valentine.
At one point, the descriptor "pop" used to be shorthand for popular or accessible. So, in theory "pop punk" could almost mean "more accessible-sounding punk." With this theory in place, Bleeding Rainbow just about fits the bill. Punk that most can get behind. Like it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine them playing a free public show on behalf of the city at a train station or in front of city hall. Well, maybe not city hall but like before a Phillies game or something. However, that would require the band to performing live and in a live setting, Bleeding Rainbow is damn loud. The guitars are turned up, the vocals are turned up, well basically everything is turned up. Arguably too loud for the masses, which is kind of "punk" if you think about it.
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