Cool Rainbows make psychedelic indie pop music that is backed by swirling orchestration and layered dreamscapes of sound. Main songwriter, Djeisan Suskov, has had music in the background of his life since he was a child. When he was nine years old, his father started Revolver Studios and by the age of thirteen, he was helping out around the studio – whether that meant running leads or cleaning up the left-behind drug paraphernalia from the studio. Djeisan gradually picked up the basics of engineering by osmosis.
When he came to forming his own band, Djeisan directed his youthful energy
into postpunk music (with Nova Echo, which evolved into Cut Off Your Hands),
art-rock (Robot Tigers), and then indie rock (with Trees Climbing Trees).
However, he gradually found himself moving away from
the sound that each of these bands made and headed back to the studio to find a
different path for his music. He decided he would take his songs further in the
studio, before trying to transfer them to a band format.
The first offering from this batch of songs was the radio single, “Southern Summer Sun,” which enjoyed high rotation on the b-net stations during early 2010. Despite having access to the high-end gear at Revolver Studios, Djeisan found himself more comfortable with starting the recording of his tracks at home on his lap-top. Once he had established the basic parts, he brought in other musicians such as Cass Mitchell on bass and various drummers, including Alex Freer (Artisan Guns), Paul Roper (Mint Chicks), and Jonathan Bree (The Brunettes).
The resulting album has the depth of sound that you would expect from someone
who has grown up in a studio. He took as a part inspiration some of the
late-period work of John Cale (such as the album, Homosapien) and a general love
of 60s psychedelic music. Yet
the instrumentation also draws from other music from the last forty years of
popular music – as on “100 voices”, where synth lines drift in-and-out
and the melody of vocals are brought forward in the mix, almost giving it the
feel of a song by the Psychedelic Furs/Chills. The subject matter draws from
everyday life seen from a skewed perspective – “Whale Rocket” was
inspired by a day of cloud-watching and “Reality” discusses the troubles of
coming down from a bad drug experience. Even when the songs touch on love,
the perspective is fresh – “Fake Tattoos” shows the enjoyment of a
relationship can fade as fast as the fun of a fake tattoo, while “Pauly”
gives bromance advice to a friend with a girlfriend problems.
In order to bring these songs to the live stage, Djeisan has enlisted Cass Mitchell (bass) and Alex Freer (drums) to form his core band (with other musicians added when required). Whale Rocket will be in stores on the 19th of March and the band will be touring in New Zealand throughout 2012.