Bleeding Rainbow

Bleeding Rainbow took its starting name from the 1980s PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow and surfaced amid the tail end of the lo-fi indie wave toward the close of 2009. Philadelphia transplants Rob Garcia and Sarah Everton, who would later marry, assembled the project from the remains of Forensic Teens, a no-wave outfit from Richmond, Virginia known for its screamy style. When the original drummer abandoned a scheduled show, Everton—whose vocal approach involved limited technique and improvised textures produced on a circuit-bent keyboard—moved behind the kit herself. Within roughly two weeks she had mastered a minimal setup consisting only of snare and floor tom in order to support Garcia’s guitar. The pair adopted a spare, heavily reverberant, analog approach and tracked material on a Tascam 388 eight-track reel-to-reel, issuing an EP of demos plus the vinyl LP Mystical Participation before scheduling Songs to Sing for release in early 2010. Prism Eyes followed later that same year. In 2012 the group adopted a new name, citing fatigue with repetitive questions about the original moniker and noting that Sleater-Kinney/Portlandia mogul Carrie Brownstein had expressed strong dislike for it. Concurrent with the change, the lineup expanded: Everton passed drumming duties to Greg Frantz while Al Creedon joined on second guitar. The resulting quartet recorded the darker, feedback-heavy full-length Yeah Right, issued in 2013, and returned the next year with the tighter, punk-oriented Interrupt.