Cat No:
MEX3461
Release Date: 13 October 2023
Label: Mexican Summer / Kemado
Packaging Type: Slip Sleeve (CD or Vinyl)
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 634457145146
Genres: Rock
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Description
Multi-instrumentalist and composer L'Rain returns with her third album I Killed Your Dog. Over-writing themes of grief and identity that informed her previous work, I Killed Your Dog considers what it means to hurt the people you love the most. Multi-layered in subject and form, L'Rain's sonic explorations interrogate instead how multiplicities of emotion and experience intersect with identity. The experimental and the hyper-commercial; the expectation and the reality; the hope and the despair.
Described by L'Rain's Taja Cheek as an "anti-break-up" record, I Killed Your Dog takes the universal pop theme of love as its starting point - bold, bratty and even a touch diabolical - and inspects it through the form of a conversation with her younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and the formal musical conventions that others have come to expect of her.
"I'm envisioning a world of contradictions, as always," Cheek explains. "Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange." Written amidst heartbreaks from the perspective of an earned maturity, I Killed Your Dog takes the sonic world laid out by L'Rain in 2021's album Fatigue on a compelling new trajectory. Over-writing themes of grief and identity to consider what it means to hurt those you love the most.
L'Rain is the musical project of multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer, and curator, Taja Cheek. Alongside Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, she has developed L'Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the distinction between band and individual. Beginning as an abstract meditation on grief, Cheek traces the origins of L'Rain to the period which followed the dissolution of her vibrant DIY musical community in early 2010s NYC and the passing of her mother, Lorraine. The name L'Rain was conceived as both a tribute to her mother and her own gregarious alter ego L' (lah-postrophe), and one which she subsequently tattooed onto her arm.
Critically acclaimed by NPR, named album of the year in The Wire magazine and #2 in Pitchfork's best albums of 2021, Fatigue propelled L'Rain towards a new audience, while further cementing her place within experimental and art institutional spaces. And yet, equally inspired by gospel and '90s R&B, and touring with Black Midi and Animal Collective, Cheek is conscious of not allowing this narrative to dominate.
"I'm not really interested in being separate from the world," she explains, pointing to I Killed Your Dog as a way to bring the project back to earth. "I'm envisioning a world of contradictions, as always," Cheek explains. "Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange."
As with Fatigue, the cast of I Killed Your Dog's world is supremely varied - taking in theoretical physicists, subverting Baroque compositional tropes and the dad rock nostalgia of The Strokes, the words of choreographer Bill T. Jones, tricks of commercial advertising and voice note wisdoms of people she holds close.
Produced alongside long-tim -
Tracklisting
- 1. Sincerity Commercial
- 2. Our Funeral
- 3. Pet Rock
- 4. I Hate My Best Friends
- 5. I Killed Your Dog
- 6. All The Days You Remember
- 7. 5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)
- 1. Sometimes
- 2. r(EMOTE)
- 3. Uncertainty Principle
- 4. Oh Wow a Bird
- 5. Knead Bee
- 6. Monsoon of Regret
- 7. Clumsy
- 8. What’s That Song?
- 9. New Year’s unResolution
Disc 1
Side 1
Side 2
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NEW RELEASE
Take Off From Mercy
Contour
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Windswept
Photay
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Grandeza
Sessa
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Big For You
Zsela
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Eso Es
Gregg Kowalsky
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...Still Sad
Various Artists
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I Killed Your Dog
L'Rain
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Flying Wig
Devendra Banhart
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Modern Love
Various Artists
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Fatigue
L'Rain
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