By Megan Butler
Art by Jordan Morales
This album is like waking up at your own funeral. I can’t describe it any better. The piano chords and vocal distortion are eerie, beautiful and inescapable. On October 13th, Taja Cheek (L’Rain) posted on Instagram celebrating the album's one-year anniversary, which gladly brought the album back into my listening rotation. “I Killed Your Dog,” L’Rains third album, is an experimental masterpiece.
“Pet Rock,” the album's second single, seems to be the most traditional song on the entire album and still it plays with the boundaries of song. Her voice is so beautifully nestled into the guitar riff, although the lyrics consist entirely of one verse, chorus and outro, it still works because of the richness and the emotion. Most of this album's structure is more poetic than anything. The title track “I Killed Your Dog” is a prime example as its six verses each followed by the repeating refrain. L’Rain sings, “I felt so sick, one million sighs, licked the body as I cried, I killed your dog…. I am your dog,” she evokes confusing emotions through the visuals and allows for numerous relationships to this song.
“5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)” slowly builds and doubles her vocals to a small monologue buried by what I think is the theremin delivering that eerie pull. This folksy track has a beautiful descending guitar riff only topped by L’Rains lyrics, “you didn't think this would come out of me” a simple and subtle, I told you so.
“Kneed Bee” is one melody overlapping drums, a deep bassline, and some sort of glittering sound. These lyrics are a fast turn around from begging for direction to seeking inspiration singing, “I know who I am, thank you, ma'am ... .Tell me what you do,” like the music slapped some sense of self back into Taja Cheek.
This sixteen-song album has an unique oversaturation of interludes. She has four interludes under thirty seconds and two that are about a minute long, all of which still contain rhythm and sound but lack the dynamics to do anything but lead in the other songs. Usually I have trouble enjoying the presence of interludes, especially when there are multiple, but I found the interludes to carry me from song to song, holding up my casket.
“What's That Song?” has become one of my favorite interludes of all time. It is twenty seconds of someone struggling to remember the song in their head until the song cuts over to their mouth trumpeting. It is beautiful and strange. The interlude “I Hate My Best Friends”, another favorite, spins out like music spewed out of a jewelry box. It sounds like a haunted baby doll forever repeating a nursery rhyme, a broken tape with a hefty confession. Her friends have shown her there’s a problem, and L’Rain doesn’t know what to fix. And again I imagine crawling out of my satin-lined coffin to address the straight faced crowd.
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