Firmly entrenched within Australia’s ever-thriving scene of diverse psychedelic hybrids, releasing their array of psych-pop through their label Eureka and vinyl via Flightless Records (birthplace of psych-innovators King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard), Byron Bay’s Babe Rainbow have pooled together three increasingly exuberant and ingeniously breezy albums – the most recent, 2019’s Today, a jazz-flecked continuation of their 60’s psych reinterpretation, produced by regarded producer Kyle Mullarky.
The band’s latest single marks the arrival of their fourth album, Changing Colours. ‘Ready For Tomorrow’, a buoyant and heady psych brew fuelled by a funk-disco centred injection of fuzzed guitars and vocals that evoke freedom alongside a faint dose of melancholy, is the final foreshadowing of the upcoming record. This infectious, sun-dappled tide of Beach Boys effusing, fluid vocals and billowing, surf style guitar-bass-drums – plus the saccharine ooze of the slide guitar – make for an instant shot of vibrant, joyous psych-pop; replayable ad infinitum.
Babe Rainbow’s latest album captures a similar aura, distilled across sounds of “Laurel Canyon in the early 70s, as Crosby, Stills and Nash, waited for Young to wander back from the forest.” This sound melds with the band’s meandering 60’s fondness in a blissful, meditative flow of psych situated between California and Byron Bay, dispensing delicious musical bites from across the past half century in ample measure.
Shot by Jordan Mulane, the band’s former bass player and close companion, the video for ‘Ready For Tomorrow’ revolves around the local village watering hole, the Eltham Hotel.
LDOI 