Unstoppable rock band Bleeding Rainbow keeps 'em guessing

You’ve got to be a pretty decent band to rock somebody else’s crowd. Two weeks ago, the basement of the First Unitarian Church, as poorly lit and stuffy as ever, was packed with Mission of Burma fans, and Bleeding Rainbow flat-out rocked them with a loud, ferocious set. Not aggro, just completely adrenalized. As the feedback faded, Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia (singers, bassist and guitarist, wife and husband) smiled, drummer Ashley Arnwine wiped the sweat from her cheeks and Al Creedon stabbed his guitar into the top of an amp like he was planting a flag.

People used to call this a twee band? 

Whoever did that was wrong back when the band was just Everton and Garcia playing under the name Reading Rainbow, and they’re twice as wrong now.

“Before we — and this sounds douchey to say — before we got any national recognition, before anyone knew what we looked like or anything, and it was just, like, our Myspace page, we didn’t get [called twee] because our music was really weird and mysterious and psychedelic,” says Everton, when the band gathers for an interview a couple days before the show at the Church. “As soon as they knew we were a two-piece and we were married, it was, like, ‘Awww.’ And partially it was our own faults, because we were so naive we were just, like, ‘You are giving us attention?’”

Bleeding Rainbow’s not a bunch of kids anymore. They’ve worked some things out, like that Everton’s better off up front with a bass instead of in the back trying to sing lead and play drums at the same time. And with the recent addition of Arnwine, they’ve cemented their four-on-the-floor, slightly off-kilter, totally catchy sound. That’s what you’ll get at the live show, and it’s what you get on their fourth and finest album, Interrupt, which comes out on the Kanine label next month. (They’ll celebrate the album with a release show at Golden Tea House March 1.) 

Despite some fully caffeinated songs on this record and last year’s Yeah, Right — check out “Waking Dream” or “So You Know” or “Time and Place” — Bleeding Rainbow’s been getting stuck with the “shoegaze” tag these days. They get it, but they’re not on board. 

“It’s because we have fuzzy, noisy, distorted guitars and then, like, my delicate feminine vocals over top,” says Everton, jumping up a couple octaves for comic affect. She figures most of the band’s press, which has been largely positive but not always on-target, comes from lazy journalists not knowing how to talk about her voice. “Unless I’m screaming, it’s gonna sound twee if it’s my vocals that someone’s focusing on,” she shrugs. “It’s interesting how much your genre gets assigned to you based on lead vocals.”

“No one’s ever really come up with a description that we’re all, like, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ It’s always going to be somewhat off,” says Creedon. He figures if anybody’s still tossing the word “twee” around, it’s because they’re cutting and pasting from old reviews. The band’s sound is always changing. “That’s what I like about this band. We’re always in a state of being excited about what’s next.”

“We love to play music, and us changing over the years is a result of us being human, and our tastes evolving,” says Garcia. “We’re never overthinking shit, and being like, ‘We should sound like this.’ It’s just: ‘This is fun to play, so I’m going to play this.’”

“It’s hard to inform people without also looking like you’re being like whiny and pretentious,” says Everton. “So our new approach is to just not give a fuck.”