To say that I was waiting for Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes’ new album, Dark Rainbow, with the least patience in the world would be an understatement. Now it’s here, the connection is made, strong and relentless. Review.
DARK RAINBOW – FRANK CARTER & THE RATTLESNAKES
If it’s the calmest of their records, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes are not as quiet as a mouse on Dark Rainbow. Honey, which opens this complex fourth opus, is proof. With powerful riffs and space-filling bass, it’s sexy, sticky, intense, and passionate. The band shows it too on the third single for the record, Self Love, an incredible track made to learn how to love yourself built with melting and screaming guitars.
Love is in each and every lyric of this opus. Lost, found again, for the other or oneself, romantic, familial, or spiritual… it’s everywhere like the tarot card of the Lovers drawn by Carter for the cover art. Add a horned beast to the mix, also amongst the art characters, and you get the card of the Devil, often read as a warning against excess. And well, Dark Rainbow is also born of excess… or rather from sobriety.
Carter’s voice has never seemed so peaceful, despite the tears. Always and still powerful, its notes are clearer and yet keep that texture that makes it so unique. To highlight it, Man of the Hour, which questions the rock star’s status, has done a wonderful job, especially on this bright chorus that makes me want to scream and shout with him. The stunning Can I Take You Home and the provocative yet nonchalant American Spirit are wild, creating havoc. With them, we’re back to the incarnation of excess.
The Devil grabs a violin and Carter and Richardson welcome his sins, acknowledge them, and counter. They are using him to create Happier Days, which will talk to any lost soul who wishes to listen. For Brambles, it’s a mysterious atmosphere that strikes the amps first. The vocals are progressive, once again bright, and hoping for love. It’s, like its authors, a track with a tormented soul.
On Queen Of Hearts, the castle dips. Each note gets longer and gives the atmosphere the aura of a midnight sun. It’s with sorrow that the band continues with Sun Bright Golden Happening. An echo on the vocals, a shiver in the distant strings, the refined composition bears a fragile hope, precious and vast.
But to be able to catch a glimpse of hope, worse as to happen. The Devil puts the Lovers centre stage with the troubled and troubling Superstar. That’s why Self Love coming next is so important, pushing aside the installed fog with a well-thought-out guitar riff. True anthem, it comes in just before the last one, A Dark Rainbow. This one annunciates a rebirth, a blossoming, the end of an infernal cycle of ruin and suffering. Its chorus, once more, will bring on a great sing-along. And the length of the notes tears apart time and space.
Created from the songs that didn’t fit its elder siblings, coming from what the band called The Garden, Dark Rainbow has its own aesthetic. The Devil ends up with swords along his body, on the back of the cover, exhausted… And with all this, I really see a salutary renaissance, promising a brighter and brighter future for the band. Dark Rainbow by Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes is a total success.
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