Bleeding Rainbow has gone through extensive changes recently that have left it even better than before.
When Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia first started making music, they wanted a name that was both silly and psychedelic, so they settled on Reading Rainbow. But sharing a name with a long-running PBS children’s television show can cause a few problems.
“We would get really stupid questions about the TV show and people would write about the TV show and that was really annoying,” Everton said. “And when we looked into it, PBS had renewed the trademark on the name in 2010 so they could have hypothetically sent us a cease and desist letter at any point.”
Luckily, they didn’t have to stray far from their roots for a new name, becoming Bleeding Rainbow, which will play DC9 in Washington tonight. Although Everton mentioned sometimes people perceive it as “goth or emo,” they both agree it better encapsulates their sound — hazy, trippy and slightly dark .
A new name wasn’t the only change the Philadelphia-based band went through. It originally started as a two-piece, with Garcia on guitar and Everton on drums, but after two albums Everton and Garcia realized they couldn’t obtain the sound they desired without adding a few more instruments to the mix.
“One of the last tours we did was with the band The Dodos and that was still when we were two-piece last year,” Garcia said. “We were playing these big venues and we wanted our live sound to be so much bigger and fuller.”
Everton and Garcia decided to reach out to other musician friends in Philadelphia, eventually adding guitarist Al Creedon and drummer Greg Frantz to the mix. Garcia describes the transition from two to four band members as “natural” and by March the band had its third album finished.
The addition of two members makes a monumental adjustment to Bleeding Rainbow’s songs. When they first began, Everton and Garcia were masters of making noisy and distorted tracks evocative of late ‘80s indie pop.‘80s.
But Bleeding Rainbow’s new singles, “Pink Ruff” and “Drift Away,” show major growth in maturity from the albums Prism Eyes and Mystical Participation. Both tracks sound heavily influenced by the early roots of shoegaze, with Everton’s soaring vocals. “Drift Away” burns slower than past Bleeding Rainbow songs, but carries a lot of weight. The alternating guitars on “Pink Ruff” are a perfect example of how much more Bleeding Rainbow can accomplish with another instrument.
These new tracks are from the group’s third album, Yeah Right, which was initially slated for an October release with Kanine Records but was pushed back to January. Bleeding Rainbow is using this time to experiment with some more creative releases, such as a limited-edition cassette from their last tour with Eternal Summers.
“We knew that our album was going to be pushed back from October to January so… we didn’t want to get into a rut,” Garcia said. “So to make sure that we had new stuff to sell at our shows and to force us to keep writing new music, we made that first cassette last month.”
Everton, who creates Bleeding Rainbow’s art, also weighed in on using cassettes versus making burned CDs to sell.
“You can make tapes look a lot more official,” she said. “It’s hard to make burned CDs look cool.”
There might not be a special tape for its upcoming Washington show because they aren’t engaging a full-scale tour until later in the year. But coming back to D.C. brings to mind pleasant memories of other bands’ shows Everton and Garcia attended when living in Richmond, Va.. One of their fondest memories took place at a Graham Coxon (of Blur) solo show, where Everton gave him a guitar strap she made that Coxon actually used.
“In all these new videos of him you can see it all the time,” Garcia said. “It’s pretty great.”
Bleeding Rainbow is playing at DC9 on Tuesday, Oct. 9. Tickets are $8 and doors open at 8:30 p.m.
diversions@umdbk.com
