Description
Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows – Opaque Red Double Vinyl Record
Black Rainbows is a deliberate break from any narrow expectation attached to Corinne Bailey Rae’s earlier work. Inspired by objects, books and artworks she encountered at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, the album moves through punk, experimental rock, electronic texture, jazz and spiritual reflection. Rae’s voice remains a unifying presence, but she uses it differently from track to track: tender, shouted, spoken, layered or nearly submerged.
“A Spell, a Prayer” opens in a suspended, meditative space before the title track arrives with distorted guitar and urgent momentum. “Erasure” confronts historical violence through a stark, incantatory arrangement, and “Earthlings” expands into a cosmic plea. The first record refuses a stable genre because the subjects demand different forms. Beauty and abrasion are not opposites here; they are tools used to examine survival, memory and imagined freedom.
“Red Horse” deepens the album’s ceremonial quality, while “New York Transit Queen” explodes into a short, jubilant burst inspired by Audrey Smaltz. The latter’s punk attack demonstrates how convincingly Rae can inhabit raw speed without treating it as costume. “He Will Follow You With His Eyes” then shifts again, using a more sinuous groove to consider beauty, looking and the pressures placed on Black women’s bodies.
“Put It Down” carries a restless electronic pulse, and “Peach Velvet Sky” opens a quieter emotional space. The closing “Before the Throne of the Invisible God” stretches toward transcendence through repetition, improvisation and accumulated sound. Across the sequence, the Arts Bank functions less as a literal topic than as a portal: archival fragments lead toward contemporary songs that insist history remains active and available for transformation.
This Black Rainbows Music and Thirty Tigers edition spreads the ten-track album across two opaque red vinyl records. Catalog number BRM001LP identifies the color pressing. The expanded format gives the record’s wide dynamic range and longer closing pieces generous space, while the red discs echo the vivid visual language of the sleeve. It is a substantial physical edition of Rae’s most exploratory and confrontational album.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
A1 A Spell, A Prayer
A2 Black Rainbows
A3 Erasure
B1 Earthlings
B2 Red Horse
B3 New York Transit Queen
C1 He Will Follow You With His Eyes
C2 Put It Down
D1 Peach Velvet Sky
D2 Before The Throne Of The Invisible God
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