Kesha finally shows true colors on ‘Rainbow’
Eclectic new album has less production, electronic sheen
By the numbers, Rainbow is Kesha’s third studio album. But spiritually, it’s her first.
Out Friday, Rainbow is Kesha’s first full-length release since her prolonged battle with her or turned-alleged abuser Dr. Luke. It’s the first to feature Kesha’s voice without the electronic sheen that characterized previous hits like TiK ToK, Die Young and We R Who We R. And it’s the first album to let Kesha get weird — and not the manufactured, party-girl she projected in her previous incarnation. Rainbow is a confetti gun of an album, with 14 wildly eclectic songs that see Kesha at her defiant, unbridled best.
Rainbow is an album that many thought would never exist, a mystery complicated by legal drama. Kesha’s court battles with Dr. Luke hinged on her claims that the producer prevented her from releasing new material, with a judge denying her request to leave her contract with Luke’s Kemosabe Records. In April, Luke stepped down as Kemosabe’s CEO, and experts have suggested that Kesha reached a behind-the-scenes deal with Sony to release new music.
From Kesha’s first note on Rainbow, it’s clear the album isn’t a Dr. Luke production. While Kesha has always been a musical chameleon, her past releases under Luke were overprocessed and hollow, his lifeless pop production rendering her big-voiced choruses as artificial as the 808s surrounding them.
On Rainbow, Kesha has never sounded less polished — and that’s a compliment — as she warbles and yodels and chirps in a childlike voice. Hearing her hairraising belting on tracks, it’s baffling that anyone would think Kesha’s sounded better as a robot.
Rainbow isn’t an album for cynics. Nearly every song offers a different vision of redemption. There’s Prayer, the album’s biblical lead single, invoking images of Kesha singing from the heavens. Bastards swipes the proverb “Don’t let the bastards get you down” for its chorus, while Hymn, a prayer for the sinners, shows Kesha speeding down the highway, declaring “I know that I’m perfect, even when I’m (expletive) up.” Old Flames (Can’t Hold A Candle To You) enlists Dolly Parton for a cover of the country legend’s yearning love song.
And on the album’s simplysung title track, over a swelling orchestra, she looks at the world with childlike wonder. Considering the battles Kesha fought to bring Rainbow into the world, it’s astonishing how open and loving her worldview remains.
Many of Rainbow’s less-impressive tracks sound like other pop stars, from the Katy Perryesque Learn to Let Go to the Meghan Trainor-style Boogie Feet. But Kesha is far more interesting when left to her own weird devices, as seen in Spaceship, a banjo-plucking ballad that ends with a spoken-word outro, dictated from her rocket to space.