AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC is an expansive domain we tend to mistake for its midcentury revival, with its jingle-jangle acoustic purists like Pete Seeger. We often forget that folk’s real revelation was the field recording. Such tapes, which logged music by backwoods string bands, Black blues singers, itinerant fiddlers, and shambling jug players, and which were compiled by folklorists like Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and John Wesley Work III, laid the groundwork for the modern mixtape. Folk is entwined with recording technology’s rapid growth. Yet the popular consciousness narrowed this capacious category, whose name literally means people, to the rustic and the unplugged. When genres stake out rigid boundaries, what ends up excluded are not novel technologies, but actual folks.
Maybe this is why the musical collages of L’Rain will scan as folk to scant few listeners. Her songs weave exuberant performances—of gospel, early-aughts rock, 1990s R&B with its precise and winding vocal lines—with a tactile sense of recording atmosphere and distortion. Voicemail messages from friends and family, phone memos she made of Uber drivers, and monologues by artist peers become raw material. L’Rain cooks an original, acousmatic soup of the vernacular, but she sources the ingredients from her own life rather than culling the American scene’s far-flung cuisines like those field recorders of yore.
Her three albums—2017’s L’Rain, 2021’s Fatigue, and her latest, I Killed Your Dog—are restless and juxtapositional in a way that feels like an act of curation. This is no coincidence: Under her birth name, Taja Cheek, she spent years at MoMA PS1 programming the Queens institution’s long-running “Warm Up” series. Its collision of DJs, performers, and visual artists reflect her genius at drawing unexpected connections between artistic traditions. Melodies appear only briefly in her compositions, just enough to give you a sense of their full majesty. They hide from our full understanding in plain sight—we have to consciously grasp her songs before they slip away.
I Killed Your Dog, a mere thirty-six minutes long, is L’Rain’s lengthiest project, yet it remains suspicious of aesthetic uniformity. The record’s rapid-fire ideas, which she committed to posterity in California, New York, Florida, and London, smash together as though they were captured in different decades by diverse studio processes: the progression from treated electric guitars to early synthesizers on “Pet Rock,” for example, or the way that the sound design seems to toggle between lo- and hi-fi on the gorgeous “5 to 8 Hours A Day (WWwaG).” Closer “New Year’s UnResolution” dilates the LP’s tight sense of control, allowing the band to lock into an extended groove that’s hypnotic with piano accents and mellifluent vocals. The track feels climactic after a record of virtuosic restraint. Its sumptuous jamming, though, is laden with sly commentaries all the same.
Jazz in its many forms is one American invention that has remained associated with Black culture in spite of scattered moments of popularity that have attracted the creep of white capitalism. L’Rain’s grandfather owned a jazz club in Crown Heights, and several of her collaborators are devout heads—she describes herself as having a “complex” about jazz thanks to her relative lack of commitment to the genre. Hilarious interlude “What’s that Song?” begins with a voicemail message from a friend humming a half-remembered jazz phrase into the phone. “I know that sounds like all of them,” the caller adds, echoing L’Rain’s own blitheness. Her band subsequently tries to recreate the ditty, sprinting through the record’s only flirtation with swing time in a pastiche that confounds outside expectation.
Fusion and folk are the album’s twin conceptual binaries: The former is what the industry expects from a quote-unquote experimental ensemble of Black musicians that includes saxophone, drums, keys, bass and guest contributions from trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and trombonist Kalia Vandever. The latter is a genre L’Rain toys with in the macabre lyrics of “I Hate My Best Friends” and the woozy, somber title track—she even channels Joan Baez on its structure—but which few would ever apply to her music. I Killed Your Dog is an implicit riposte to how genre’s marketing prerogatives fail Black artists and by extension culture at large. As L’Rain told Pitchfork in 2021, labels such as “experimental” have traditionally been denied to soul and R&B singers, as though these Black styles didn’t chart out new frontiers of sound: “I want to challenge myself first and foremost, to try to surprise myself, but I also try to challenge listeners, critics, and the industry: What are you going to do with this? Where does this fit in?” Her mercurial vision enables her to navigate perceptions of her race in a business that tends to winnow Black-originated traditions until they can be slotted into a white canon.
The tension between industry pigeonholing and L’Rain’s own varied tastes comes to the fore on the record’s best number, “Uncertainty Principle,” a mishmash of angelic, descending vocal melodies and kraut-rock percussion that zooms by us in colorful succession like a passing freight train. During its final moments, the whole song brightens into a big-budget cinematic spectacle. The caboose derails; the band wigs out entirely; the drums tumble through toms and cymbals; the guitar smears its distortion up and down the neck. Other artists would let this conflagration simmer into an extended feedback drone, but L’Rain slams the door on us before we can even comprehend that these clattering sounds are within her wheelhouse.
Billed by the artist herself as her “basic bitch” record, I Killed Your Dog is the strongest exhibition of L’Rain’s songwriting yet—certainly more bold than basic. Her past two records dealt with her mother’s death in its immediate aftermath and then years later, but I Killed Your Dog feels even more intimate, perhaps because it strips her voice of the obscuring overdubs that characterized its predecessors. Cheek, a fantastic, exact singer, allows us to sift her from underneath the layers, shaving down the calluses of the past so that new ones may form. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be alone,” she coos on the last cut, “Vomit rain spit out snow.” I Killed Your Dog is in part a document of personal experience as it hardens in real time, but it also gleams with wit, reflexivity, and mischief: qualities that nurse a singer’s soul in a climate that threatens to force her into boxes too small for her art.
Daniel Felsenthal writes fiction, criticism, essays, and poems, and lives in New York City.
