Description
Label Review.
2018 album also available in CD.
Our Overview.
Leeds-based Menace Beach return with their third album ‘Black Rainbow Sound’, due out via Memphis Industries.
‘Black Rainbow Sound’ is the band’s first new material since early 2017’s ‘Lemon Memory’ and, after a self-imposed break from tour duties, the album exhibits a profound shift in their sound, whilst still mainlining the blasts of noise, visceral power and timeless pop songsmithery of their previous releases.
Unlike the band’s previous records, ‘Black Rainbow Sound’ came to life in the bands studio, where Liza Violet and Ryan Needham built dense late night orchestrations from drum machines, synthesizers, loops and guitar noise, before being ripped apart and reimagined by the full Menace Beach cast at The Nave studio in Leeds with coproducer Matt Peel (Eagulls).
Never ones to shy away from an intriguing collaboration, Black Rainbow Sound contains songs featuring Brix Smith of The Fall and Brix & The Extricated. “The synchronicity of the universe just forced us and Brix together. The very day l finished reading her biography she played us on her BBC 6Music show along with a wonderfully outthere monologue of how the song made her feel. I said thanks, we got chatting and it went from there. She’s a burning comet of positive energy.”
On ‘Black Rainbow Sound’, Menace Beach continue to explore their own unique aesthetic, venturing much further into a colourful world of bizzaro no wave analogue synths and static drenched electronic euphoria, which they have been circling for some time.
Lustrous, dizzying, and bursting with cacophonous vintage electronics, the sounds on ‘Black Rainbow Sound’ act as an otherworldly backdrop for the album’s enigmatic lyrics to play out. Celestial conversations, night terrors, love, anti-love, good vs evil, light vs dark, friendly crows, death, depression and teenage tongues and are all here to absorb; the more introspective topics often hidden in plain sight atop celebratory choruses and melodic hooks.