alice gold: seven rainbows

There’s an air of free-spirited wanderlust surrounding Alice Gold’s Seven Rainbows, unsurprising given that these songs took shape during the many rambling journeys that add colour to the accompanying press release: a six-month roadtrip across the US in a 1978 Winnebago she’d won in a poker game; lodging for free in a Luxembourg castle in exchange for giving English lessons; and eventually returning to London, where she lived on a boat “as a cheap way of avoiding the nine-to-five grind”.

There the tousle-haired blonde rocker, who professes a penchant for “wine and joints”, recorded an EP as Alice & The Majesty with Beth Orton collaborators Ali Friend and Ted Barnes for Rob Da Bank’s Sunday Best label, which attracted the attention of major label EMI. Then, like so many others she got lost amid the Terra Firma shakeup and ended up back out on the margins, only to win over the execs at Fiction Records (Elbow, Snow Patrol) with the home-recorded demos of what would become Seven Rainbows. Self-penned and self-funded, Gold completed the album in just over three weeks with no-fee production help from the esteemed Dan Carey (Emilíana Torrini, Mara Carlyle).

Gold’s blog, which bursts with quotes and photos of Tina Turner, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Patti Smith, is a pretty good indication of where her key inspirations lie, but there’s a resolutely chart-friendly sound at work on Seven Rainbows, swirling layers of ’60s and ’70s rock, funk basslines and soulful vocals into radiant pop arrangements. Gold is also an unabashed Janis Joplin fan, and cultivates a bluesy, soul-rock style in her image. It’s an approach that works well on the slow-burn, spacey psychedelia of ‘Conversations Of Love’, but tips over into indulgent on ‘How Long Can These Streets Be Empty’, which loses its way in a crush of cymbals, guitar reverb and exaggerated soul-sista inflections (“I went to find food for my soul, lawd knows”, etc.).

Gold is an alluring vocalist – sultry, sweet and throaty by turns – and gives her all on the many powerful chorus hooks; she may borrow from soul tropes but it’s an affectation, one that hallmarks bold, magpie pop. The blues-rock style she favours adds an edge to Seven Rainbow‘s songs, but Gold is at her best on the more elegant, refined numbers, such as the wistful piano waltz of ‘Sadness Is Coming’ or the paean to Euro romance that is ‘Runaway Love’. Inspired by a rare Noëlle Cordier 7” discovered in a Parisian flea market, it’s pinned with breathy, cooing vocals, vogue pinches of strings and slices of twanging rock guitar.

The dizzying, uptempo ‘Orbiter’, with its driving funk-laden baseline, zooming guitar licks and jangling tambourine claps, and ‘Cry Cry Cry’, a beautifully paced affair with lush vocals, hand-clap beats and hip-shaking slow-samba bass, complete the triumvirate of standouts that pillar the album, a confident if not game-changing ‘debut’ from an artist whose time has surely come.

[Fiction; July 4, 2011]

Written by: Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Tags: alice gold, seven rainbows

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 at 2:50 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.