Rainbow
Finyl Vinyl

Listening notes

Rainbow's Finyl Vinyl, released on Mercury Records in 1986 (catalog number 422-827 987-1 M2), is a double-album compilation presented across four sides of vinyl. Falling under the hard rock and rock genres, the set draws its title from a deliberate play on words — "final" rendered phonetically in the spirit of the format that carries it.

The fourteen tracks are distributed across the four sides with some variation in density. Side A opens with "Spotlight Kid" at five minutes, moves through "I Surrender" at five minutes and forty-five seconds, and closes with the comparatively brief "Miss Mistreated" at three minutes and twenty-one seconds. Side B carries the most tracks of any side, running through five selections: "Jealous Lover," "Can't Happen Here," "Tearin' Out My Heart," "Since You Been Gone," and "Bad Girl." Of these, "Tearin' Out My Heart" is the longest on that side at eight minutes and four seconds.

Side C is anchored by "Difficult To Cure," which at eleven minutes and fifteen seconds is the longest individual track on the record. It is followed by "Stone Cold" and "Power." Side D closes the compilation with three tracks: "Man On The Silver Mountain" at eight minutes and twenty seconds, "Long Live Rock 'n' Roll" at seven minutes and twelve seconds, and "Weiss Heim" at five minutes and ten seconds, bringing the program to a close.

The double-album format accommodates a total runtime that would be difficult to contain on a single record, and the sequencing places the two longest individual pieces — "Difficult To Cure" and "Man On The Silver Mountain" — on the latter two sides of the set. Mercury issued the release at a point when the band's active run had concluded, a circumstance the punning title appears to acknowledge directly.

[DRAFT — unreviewed, awaiting fact check]