Rainbow

Instead of dwelling on what isn’t said on the record, she chooses to use her experiences to find the strength to move on. And so we get the most authentic Kesha album yet, and it’s a triumph.

It’s a bold, focused, universal statement about freedom--from self-hatred, from paralyzing internal conflicts, from gender expectations, from negative influences, and (especially) from other people’s shit.

Throughout, on both killers and filler, the singer sounds like she’s having so much fun.

For the most part, the pop songs work better than the mid-tempo numbers. They’re more spirited, but less moving. “Praying,” for example, is better as catharsis than as an earworm, but it’s no less powerful for that.

Rainbow is a document of Kesha coming into her own, blossoming into the artist she’s always truly wanted to become.

Rainbow is simply the record she needed to make. And at a time where most pop music is either designed by committee or drowning in beigeness, it’s also the kind of individual and achingly honest record we needed to hear.

Kesha shines brightest on "Woman," an undeniably funky number whose soulful beat is driven by the Dap-Kings' legendary horns. Unedited takes of giddy laughter shared between Kesha and her co-writers in the vocal booth pepper the song, demonstrating an artist who refuses to be stripped of her joy.

While Rainbow may be initially defined by the context from which it emerged, the extraordinary vision that Kesha has put forth ensures that in due course, Rainbow will be remembered on its own merits: not only as the unquestionable best album she’s ever put out, but also one of 2017’s finest pop releases.

While she can’t resist opening with “Bastards,” a sweetly sung kiss-off to those who have underestimated and manipulated her, Kesha devotes most of Rainbow to exploring a broad palette of emotions and unleashing the full range of her voice--a flexible instrument she didn’t always effectively showcase on the bratty pop of her earlier albums.

Where previous albums had been bland landfill electro-pop rendered even more indistinguishable through her heavily autotuned vocals, Rainbow offers a range of approaches, from pop and R&B to country and funk, applied to material that brings greater depth to her characteristic sassy attitude.

By slyly alternating between these two extremes throughout Rainbow, Kesha winds up with a comeback that's fully realized emotionally and musically.

An album that should theoretically sound like a jumbled mess doesn’t. It’s held together by the character and sheer force of will of the artist at its centre.

It’s a vivid account of a woman’s unwanted confrontation with a powerful tormentor--“a bogeyman under my bed putting crazy thoughts inside my head,” as she puts it in “Learn to Let Go”--as well as her determination to leave the resulting damage behind.

The cathartic nature of the album is clearest on the emotive piano and string-laden ballad ‘Praying’, a forceful Lady-Gaga-worthy offering of defiance, as she hollers “’Cos you brought the flames and you put me through hell / I had to learn how to fight for myself”.

On her excellent comeback record, Rainbow, Kesha channels that drama into the best music of her career--finding common ground between the honky-tonks she loves (her mom is Nashville songwriter Pebe Sebert) and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," between glossy beats, epic ballads and grimy guitar riffs. In the process, she also finds her own voice: a freshly empowered, fearlessly feminist Top 40 rebel.

It's not a perfect album--some songs feel too fast, almost manic in their desire to exist--but its message is clear. Kesha is surviving, yes, but thriving too. [Sep 2017, p.108]

The album captures a mixture of genres that come together to create a really vulnerable and organic sound. Kesha uses Rainbow to let her listeners into her struggles, thoughts and true personality, something missing from her previous releases.

Rainbow may not contain the electrobops you expect from Kesha Sebert, but at its heart, it does possess what drew everyone to her in the first place: confidence, sonic booms, and an assurance that everything will be alright when the storm clears.

Rainbow, as a comprehensive work, feels much more organic and of this earth than anything by dollar-sign Ke$ha.

It doesn't all work, of course, and that kind of wacky humour nestled alongside self-empowerment anthems can be jarring, but it's all in service of Kesha re-discovering the fun, the joy, the rainbow.

While it might not be the discovery of a new talent, it's certainly the deepening of an existing one—another in a long line of female pop stars initially given limited creative and professional agency now intent on exploding the patriarchy.