Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 44:38 minutes | 908 MB | Genre: R&B, Soul
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Black Rainbows Music

Black Rainbows is a musical project inspired by the objects and artworks collected by Theaster Gates at the Stoney Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Situated at the Great Grand Crossing neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side, Stoney Island Arts Bank is a cathedral to Black Art, a curated collection of Black archives comprising books, sculpture, records, furniture and problematic objects from America’s past. As well as being a site for archive, the Arts bank is also a place for convening. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Wide ranging in it’s themes, Black Rainbows’ subjects are drawn from encounters with objects in the Arts Bank. Taking us from the rock hewn churces of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit Queen 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs’ loophole. Black Rainbows explores Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. The project will be released in various iterations – live performances, books, visuals, lectures, exhibitions, and more. Sonically, the album is a multi-genre mix of the progressive R&B, neo soul sound that will be familiar to fans but it also contains rock, jazz and electronic elements. The album was produced by S.J. Brown and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Corinne Bailey Rae’s fourth album draws deep inspiration from the archives of Stony Island Arts Bank, a gallery and community center on Chicago’s South Side that houses art and artifacts regarding the Black experience in America—everything from the vinyl collection of legendary house music DJ Frankie Knuckles to “negrobilia” used to perpetuate offensive stereotypes. Among the objects she gravitated toward was the writing of Harriet Jacobs, whose 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, recalled a harrowing existence: Born into slavery in North Carolina, she escaped her owner’s sexual abuse by pretending to run away and instead hiding for seven years in a crawl space in her free grandmother’s house that was so small she couldn’t stand up but which allowed her to occasionally watch her children and sew by the light from a tiny borehole. “I stitchеd myself into your heart/ I thread my needlе by sister North Star/ And I missed your quiet hands/ Their tiny weight,” Bailey Rae sings on the lush, gorgeous “Peach Velvet Sky.” She’s accompanied only by piano, alternating between twinkling hope and the ominous allusion of heavy left-hand notes.

“New York Transit Queen” is a thrilling surprise—the title chanted over handclaps before punk frenzy hits like a 5 train barreling into the station at full speed. It’s a story of beauty and fierceness and triumph, gleaned from a photo of 1950s Miss New York Transit pageant winner Audrey Smaltz, who grew up to be a contributing editor at Vogue and manage fashion shows for big-name designers. “Erasure,” meanwhile, is an aggressive garage-rock nugget, a fuzzed out Bailey Rae hollering, “They Typex’ed all the Black kids out of the picture/ So when they pictured that scene, they wouldn’t be seen/ Baby girl in the front row, with the cornrows/ Smiling at the band/ They made a cartoon of you.” It’s about as far as you can imagine from the easy-listening charm of “Put Your Records On,” and it’s invigorating. She plays with psychedelic soul on sensual “Earthlines,” which channels something adventurous but also a little dangerous, robotically promising over wild bloops and bleeps, “Don’t you know, Earthlings/ You can start again.” On “A Spell, A Prayer,” Bailey Rae’s caramel voice travels from a soft, soothing coo to a sort of banshee wail, the song’s initial plainspoke rhythm matching her on its quest to a wilder place of jazz skronk and rock noise. Cantering “Red Horse” is Big Sky-expansive, and “He Will Follow You With His Eyes” summons an island breeze as Bailey Rae sings of “the promise of the potion that I buy … My black hair kinking/ My black skin gleaming.” And the title track is joyous, glimmering and energetic with sax blare, like some soul sunbeam. – Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist:
1-1. Corinne Bailey Rae – A Spell, A Prayer (05:26)
1-2. Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows (01:57)
1-3. Corinne Bailey Rae – Erasure (02:46)
1-4. Corinne Bailey Rae – Earthlings (03:38)
1-5. Corinne Bailey Rae – Red Horse (05:42)
1-6. Corinne Bailey Rae – New York Transit Queen (01:49)
1-7. Corinne Bailey Rae – He Will Follow You With His Eyes (03:45)
1-8. Corinne Bailey Rae – Put It Down (08:29)
1-9. Corinne Bailey Rae – Peach Velvet Sky (05:50)
1-10. Corinne Bailey Rae – Before The Throne Of The Invisible God (05:12)

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