Rainbow Albums: The best record for every colour
When I was little, I always remember being perplexed by this certain nursery rhyme my mum used to sing me that claimed you could “sing a rainbow” – you may also be familiar with it. It made the bizarre suggestion that you could somehow “listen with your eyes” to feel colour, and I never could quite wrap my head around it, like some sort of weird psychedelic metaphor Paul McCartney might have come up with in the late 1960s. But as time has gone on, I think I’ve found the answer to this great dilemma of life, and instead of seeing rainbows in the sky, it involves charting them in album form.
Of course, colour is everything when it comes to album covers. It’s the biggest marker of what any record will entail – the themes, the emotions, and everything in between. But when you think of any selection of iconic albums, the choice of image can range from the completely mundane to the absolutely absurd, all of which, in their own way, have a hand in making the record the iconic entity it goes on to become.
Take something like The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, for example, where the complete explosion of colour and life gives you an instant impression of its swirling psychedelia before you even have to listen to a single song. Other albums give less away by taking a seemingly simpler approach. Having one block colour as a cover may seem a bold choice, but in doing so, it also creates a whole spectrum of sonic hues.
This less-is-more approach makes each album have its own special gravitas, whether it takes on a special alternative name based on the colour or just becomes synonymous with that specific shade. It’s happened countless times over the years, spanning various eras, genres, and musical moments, but what each single-colour album cover shares is a destiny to become iconic—if it hasn’t already been cemented in that league anyway.
It may seem like child’s play to devote an entire space for a selection of rainbow albums, but putting the sonics aside for just a moment, there’s no denying that there’s something satisfying about ten albums making up a complete spectrum of colour, while encompassing every diverse facet of genre in the process.
The 10 best rainbow albums:
Red: Talking Heads – Talking Heads: 77
Starting off strong in a bolt of blazing red is Talking Heads and their debut album Talking Heads: 77. Trying to denote the meaning of the choice of colour is a difficult task – was it representative of anger, vis-à-vis standout single ‘Psycho Killer’, or was it just merely a way of making a striking first impression as the freshest faces on the new wave scene? Who knows, but if there’s anything this debut did do, it certainly got the masses spinning in the direction of the Talking Heads.
Whatever the symbolic intentions of David Byrne and Co, they were steadfast in wanting to ensure that the sound of the album “Convey[ed] a modern message about the importance of taking charge of your own life,” whilst still including a heavy dose of fun and frivolity in its midst, a message that became pertinent to much of their body of work. The album cover may not communicate as much, but by its own simplistic standard, it did its job in drawing the listener into the Talking Heads’ fantastical world.
Orange: Frank Ocean – Channel Orange
Moving on to the second colour of the rainbow, while Byrne and Frank Ocean could hardly be considered instant sonic companions, there’s actually a lot more similarity to the latter’s Channel Orange than you might think. Ocean’s debut album from 2012, much like the Talking Heads’ from over 35 years prior, experimented with an eclectic smorgasbord of pop, funk, jazz, and psychedelia in a way that Byrne himself, although hailing from a completely different sonic time period, would be proud of.
Including singles ‘Thinkin Bout You’ and ‘Lost’, which went on to define the sound of the early 2010s, Channel Orange became rapturous in stoking up the critical reception towards Ocean. Scoring him a nomination for ‘Album of the Year’ as well as a win for ‘Best Urban Contemporary Album’ at the Grammys, one single orange hue put Ocean on an industry pedestal – and left punters of new music reeling in its midst.
Yellow: Mac DeMarco – This Old Dog
In a similar contemporary vein, Mac DeMarco’s This Old Dog from 2017 brings the sunshine with its all-yellow design. But the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ has never been more applicable than here, as despite its jaunty and upbeat exterior sleeve, the reality was that This Old Dog explored all the themes of reckoning and change that really puts the listener back down to Earth, rather than making them feel on top of it.
DeMarco penned the album in the process of uprooting his life to Los Angeles, and said at the time: “I realised that moving to a new city and starting a new life takes time. And it was weird, because usually I just write, record, and put it out; no problem. But this time, I wrote them and they sat. When that happens, you really get to know the songs. It was a different vibe.” With the themes of ageing and undying love ruminating around songs like its titular track, DeMarco proved that yellow had a lot more light and shade than you might think.
Green: Charli XCX – Brat
Unless you’ve been living in hiding for the past year, the wrath of Brat by Charli XCX has been inescapable, as has its glaring green glow. For all the ways that Brat has exploded in popularity, its colour and simplistic cover have become major factors in that appeal, leaving the door open for a much more straightforward approach to sonic artistic design to take flight off the back of it.
Tying in with some of its most successful singles like ‘Apple’, Brat’s green branding will likely become a future case study in album promotion for how one colour and typeface instantly became synonymous with one specific musical mood and movement. There is a lot to be said for its continued impact, but if one thing is for certain, the memories of the summer of 2024 will always carry that little hint of lime tinge.
Blue: Joni Mitchell – Blue
When you think of melancholy, of peace, of resignation, there’s no better soundtrack to that melting pot of feeling than Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Whether it’s reflected off the landscape of the sky or the sea, there’s just something about Mitchell’s cerulean hues and even smoother vocals that makes the album just as fresh, soothing, and equally invigorating as it was some 54 years ago.
It’s without a doubt that Blue is Mitchell’s most unmistakable body of work, but she, too, is no stranger to painting the rainbow through song. Between the shine of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and the song ‘Favourite Colour’, the singer is clearly a fan of vibrant tones and is the perfect addition to this list. But Blue is the cream of the crop, demonstrating that one block colour can have far more depth than what simply meets the eye.
Purple: Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I Might See
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Prince’s Purple Rain would be the instant obvious choice for this, but to actually look at the album cover, there is a surprisingly distinct lack of the colour it is named after. As such, Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See takes the floor, with its lavender haze of dream pop sonics suddenly obscuring everything else from view.
Representing the band’s pinnacle of mainstream success, standout track ‘Fade Into You’ became an instant cornerstone of 1990s angst, and has remained a staple of that moody musical ambience ever since. Delving into a beguiling world of mysticism and intrigue, it’s fair to say that Mazzy Star’s efforts were a puncture on any straightforward notions of chart pop at the time, but in doing so challenged any pretences of what exactly that ideal should mean.
Pink: Nina Simone – Wild is the Wind
The colour pink has a somewhat unfair reputation of being air-headed and sugary. But if there’s anything that Nina Simone was not, it was this, with no bigger proclamation of that reckoning more than her 1966 album Wild is the Wind. Against its powerful magenta backdrop, Simone asserted that this too could be the colour of fire, romance, and passion, all while never compromising on her true sonic self.
Encompassing iconic cuts including ‘Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’, Simone truly stamped what it meant to be a woman in jazz through the album, encompassing all the themes of the civil rights causes that she fought so tirelessly for in her wake. In doing so, she proved once and for all that pink absolutely isn’t as frivolous as it might seem.
White: The Beatles – The White Album
Yes, I know what you’re all thinking – white is not a colour of the rainbow. Sure. But for the sake of fullness, as well as to include three more classic albums, we will proceed, and what better way to do it than with The Beatles’ 1968 magnum opus, The White Album? Indeed, of all the colourful contenders in the list, it’s this blank canvas that steals the show for being the most prolific, but it’s not without merit.
Choosing from a litany of hits not limited to ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’, and ‘Revolution 9’, the lore surrounding the album was one that sealed The Beatles into their own separate holy league of greatness, not that they weren’t already heading there, anyway. But on the other end of the rock spectrum, a decidedly more hellish tone was later on the horizon…
Black: AC/DC – Back in Black
If there was any colour that aptly described the pits of hell, it would be black, which AC/DC suited down to a tee. Whether through ‘Hells Bells’ or ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, the band proved that from the darkest depths, the most fiery efforts that the rock and roll canon had ever heard could emerge.
The overwhelming success of Back in Black cemented them as one of the best acts of the genre, particularly at a time when they needed it most. Following the death of Bon Scott, it was the first of the band’s albums to be helmed by Brian Johnson, and with him, a whole new league of rock godliness was created.
Brown: The Band – The Band
Finally, we reach our end with The Band’s The Band, otherwise known as ‘The Brown Album’ to conclude our colourful selections. In many ways, there was no better tone to communicate the group’s earthly connections, rooted in folk rock and Americana, than this, and what the eponymous album demonstrates as a whole is that The Band were always confident in their brand.
Coincidentally following The Beatles’ The White Album in 1968, the release of ‘The Brown Album’ merely a year later also constituted the view of a concept record, painting an abstract portrait of people and places across the American landscape in an unflinching and searingly honest way. In a lot of ways, this was putting Beatlemania to the test with a transatlantic contender – and it paid dividends, as both go down in the scores of classic music history.
