Vinyl LP
In a recent interview with Crack Magazine, Taja Cheek, the mastermind behind L’Rain, called attention to the advantages of making uncategorizable music: “If someone can’t pin down what you are, then you can be whatever you want to be,” she said of her penchant for reinvention. On her latest album, I Killed Your Dog, that permission for infinite interpretability extends from artist to listener. The album is so rich with playful experimentation that it can be enjoyed as an experimental pop-soul album, a campy indie rock opera, or some other thing that only becomes clear with further listens. All of it is in service of exploring the thrills of daring to know, love, and hurt another person.
Take the provocative title track on which Cheek confesses, “I killed your dog/ It made me happy,” over creeping keys and bass that—after a cue of haunting, modulated laughter—morphs into a florid swirl of horns and whooshing synths. The track pulls on a thread introduced on “Kill Self” from 2021’s Fatigue, which opens with the line, “Reverse evolve/ Kissing my dogs/ Killing myself.” “I Killed Your Dog” takes the destruction a step further, turning a confession of murder into a kind of hymn.
On her previous albums, Cheek and an evolving crew of collaborators—including L’Rain mainstays Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz—explored the ins and outs of grief and resilience via unconventional compositions consisting of atmospheric instrumentation and found sounds. While those albums established L’Rain as an icon of experimental music, I Killed Your Dog—which Cheek has described as her “basic bitch” album—takes a page from poppier genres without sacrificing that innovative edge.
L’Rain’s characteristically quirky interludes remain—like the patchwork of zooms and bloops on “All the Days You Remember,” or the intro of “What’s That Song?” during which someone verbally describes the instrumentation that follows. But songs like “New Year’s UnResolution” step into more conventional pop music structures, using ethereal indie rock to probe the uncertainty of a new breakup and following a verse-chorus-verse path before spinning into a winding outro. Cheek’s approach to composition is often compared to sound collage, but the dynamism of the soundscapes on I Killed Your Dog casts L’Rain as a project capable of instilling its various musical elements with both artful tension and graceful slack to create rich tapestries of sound. One of those elements is the human voice—both Cheek’s and others—which rises and falls in space and tone to hold the disparate instrumental elements together. Another is guitar, which Cheek threads throughout the album letting it flourish at the forefront of tracks like “5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG),” a spacey folk song about humans’ hidden capacity for surprising actions. Even on this “basic bitch”—i.e. more “approachable”—album L’Rain’s compositions and subjects challenge listeners to reconsider what they expect from popular and experimental music alike.
