Rainbow Kitten Surprise
College Street Music Hall
New Haven
March 7
Halfway through Rainbow Kitten Surprise's transcendent set at College Street Music Hall Saturday night, lead singer Ela Melo spoke to the crowd, who had been shouting along to many of the songs and greeting every number with intense applause.
"It's cold out there in more ways than one," she said, "but this feels like a group of friends" — people who were looking out for one another and for the band — and she was grateful. For fans of the band, which started in 2013 at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the New Haven appearance was a long time coming, and worth the wait.
Rainbow Kitten Surprise occupies a unique place in the alternative music firmament. The core band members — Melo, Darrick "Bozzy" Keller on guitar and backup vocals, Ethan Goodpaster on guitar, and Jess Haney on drums — met in college to form a folk group, but their musical ideas grew in multiple directions fast. With Charlie Holt on bass, they built a reputation on a burning live show playing genre-twisting songs that incorporated ideas from rock, folk, hip hop, and elsewhere to create something no else else quite does. The music is full of stops and starts, quick changes in texture and rhythm, and interlaced guitar lines, all pulled together by Melo's torrent of lyrics, which swing from funny to sad, plaintive to biting, in a heartbeat, and are full of quick wit and deep personal emotion. The band released two albums — Seven and Mary in 2013 and RKS in 2015 — and with some relentless touring landed spots at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and Austin City Limits Festival.
RKS's third release, How to: Friend, Love, Freefall, released in 2018, got the band onto Elektra Records and found Melo and the band writing their strongest and most vulnerable material yet. Musically, the band was firing on all cylinders; with ideas galore, the members created intricate arrangements that they played with muscular ferocity. In her lyrics, Melo created complex internal and external emotional landscapes. The narrator of her songs swung from hilarious to devastated in the blink of an eye, and created an indelible portrait of a person and entire social scene that was tough, glorious, and heartbreakingly fragile. It was a dispatch from someone living in precariousness, tilting over the edge of something. It made for great art. It also led to Melo having to take a break after coming out as transgender in 2022. A tour scheduled for 2023 — the band's first after the pandemic shutdown — was cancelled. Melo went into isolation. Differences within the band led to Charlie Holt's departure. For the band's fans, it looked like it might be the end.
Instead, it was a rebirth. The band put out its fourth album, Love Hate Music Box, in 2024, and its fifth album, Bones, in 2025. The lyrics' more hopeful tilt suggested Melo might be doing better. The band then announced a slew of new tour dates, featuring bassist Maddie Bouton, which it appears to be keeping.
The three-year delay could explain some of the anticipation in the room, and a readiness to be open, that extended to the opening act, Common People: Nicky Winegardner on vocals and guitar, Cormac Cadden on drums, Konrad Ulich on bass and vocals, and Asher Thomson and Sam Belzer on guitars.
"You sound great," Winegardner said of the crowd early in the band's set. He explained that he "grew up 30 minutes from here, so I am excited." Band and audience met each other's energies, as Common People had a big sound. Thomson and Belzer used various electric guitar textures to create a rich atmosphere for Windegardner's keen, raspy vocals to cut through the middle of, while Cadden and Ulich held down a steady foundation. Common People also had a knack for writing song after song that sounded like an anthem, with churning verses, wide-open choruses, and plenty of hooks. They were students of previous rock hitmakers who sounded like they might already have some hits of their own.
In between songs, Winegardner was an affable front man, declaring near the end of the set that "we couldn't have asked for a better homecoming. Thank for being so amazing," and "stay in touch."
Rainbow Kitten Surprise then took the stage enveloped in smoke that Melo strutted out of to launch into "Hell Nah" from Bones. From the first note, the band showed that the music heard on the recordings involves very little studio trickery, as the members of the quintet nimbly switched roles and instruments to create each song's tricky arrangement, while Melo proved a magnetic front person without having to say very much at all between songs. Banter was in a lot of ways unnecessary: with lyrics as dense and divulging as Melo's are, was it really fair to ask for more? So Rainbow Kitten Surprise tore through the first half of its set, leaning hard into Bones and How to: Friend, Love, Freefall while also picking up fan favorites from its first two records and Love Hate Music Box.
Two-thirds of the way through the set, the band changed gears. Melo reminded the audience that they had started as a "folk operation," but they also wanted to "explore genres and our inner selves and the way music is made. Thank you for sticking with us." The four original members then gathered around one microphone, singing in rich harmonies accompanied by acoustic guitars and light percussion. The audience ate it up, at one point spontaneously adding more percussion by clapping and stomping. After three songs, the band returned to its electric format, closing out the night with high-energy songs from Bones and Freefall that culminated in "It's Called: Freefall," perhaps the band's best-known song, about a conversation with the devil that has some of Melo's best jokes and is also about narrowly avoiding suicide. But something of the acoustic part of the evening remained in everything that followed, when each person in College Street Music Hall had a hand, and foot, in making the music.
