Kesha

Rainbow

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.

Californian pop hero Kesha returns with a defiant country and garage rock-tinged triumph.

Kesha channels that drama into the best music of her career – finding common ground between the honky-tonks she loves and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," between glossy beats, epic ballads and grimy guitar riffs.

Sometimes she'll slide into cliché, usually by recycling therapy-speak, but how she pairs these credos with veiled confessions is as striking and moving as her party songs are weird and funny. By slyly alternating between these two extremes throughout Rainbow, Kesha winds up with a comeback that's fully realized emotionally and musically.

The suggestion Rainbow successfully posits is that the woman who lurked somewhere behind the Ke$ha image might be every bit as fierce and screw-you as her persona, and a substantially more eclectic and idiosyncratic musical force to boot.

The result is a revelation. 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.

The biggest lesson of Rainbow should be that our days of underestimating the ambitions and abilities of Kesha Rose Sebert are over.

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.

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.

Make no mistake, Rainbow is steadfastly, stubbornly about embracing a new identity.

On Rainbow, Kesha artfully reinvents herself without losing the fun, wild energy that made her such an appealing pop figure in the first place.

Rainbow is joyful and affirmational and sad and sexy and strange, sometimes all at once, and has just enough charm to overcome its strange pacing, stylistic incoherence, and a couple of weak tracks (the Ben Folds-produced title track being the worst offender). It’s easily the singer’s strongest work, and will surely run circles around most of the year’s mainstream pop offerings.

Rainbow probably wouldn't pass the rhetorical test of critical objectivity: If this weren't a Kesha album, it's unlikely anyone would notice it. But while it might not be the discovery of a new talent, it's certainly the deepening of an existing one.

Rainbow is both stranger and more normal than you expect; uneven – does Kesha really rhyme “highway” with “Hyundai”? – but likable.

'Rainbow' is a muddled hotch-potch that offers little beyond the fact it heralds her return. It's great to have Kesha back - it really is - but let's hope the quality improves in future.

Turn this album into an EP of its best six or seven cuts and it would be 5/5 material, because Rainbow is a smart, sassy, well-calibrated return to the fray.