It's hard to find anything that would discourage me from fully endorsing abstract pop singer Rachael Dadd's second LP Kaleidoscope. Even if she elected to promote the record in as reckless and unruly of a manner as dumping buckets of paint onto passing motorists from a hot-air balloon, I'd probably feel inclined to consider such an action to be a quirky, if a poorly planned, extension of the work's overarching themes rather than a disqualifying act of antisocial hostility. This is because Kaleidoscope feels like an untarnished force of positivity in the world. It is a record that can't help but burst forth with a quietly frantic tenderness in a rush to expose all of the delicate consequential introspections it contains. Rachael's voice has the breathy whisper of a practitioner of romantic Celtic harmonies, textured with the whiskery brush of a Charlyn Marie Marshall-eque purr, and transposed with the intimacy of an after-hours open-mic night at a local coffee shop, where performances are shared while surrounded by love ones and receptive, encouraging strangers. The melodic waft of her voice is like a feather giving chase of the wind, seemingly elevated by magic, but in fact, moved by an application of will and an acceptance of the affordances presented by accommodating ontological pressures. The heavens will furnish a path for those who are receptive to the light of providence, and Kaleidoscope is the lens of the pathfinder. Incredibly, it is Rachael's vocal performance that is possibly the most firmly moored aspect of the record, as her loftiness is often matched and exceeded by Platonic country-western elements, such as strings, pianos and guitars, all of which are plastic and translucent in nature, and therefore expandable to encompass the whole theatre of the sky's divine atrium. I'm going to go back to my original metaphor for a moment, where I imagined Rachael dumping paint out of a dirigible, because it is an apt visual representation, only instead of splattering on the ground and causing confusion, I revise the scenario so that the technicolor bilge freezes in air, forming a walkable incline that you can climb, with hardly the effort of a sparrow in flight, in order to join Rachael in her floating, color-menagerie keep. IN the end, Kaleidoscope is your key to a kingdom in the clouds that was made to receive your audience.
