L’Rain
Songbyrd, October 26, 2023
Back in the summer I was all set to see
L’Rain, opening for LCD Soundsystem on the Re: Set Festival. But I didn’t arrive in time, and missed their set entirely. A friend has assured me that L’Rain was one of the best shows he’d seen in years, and Pitchfork continues to rave about the records, so I meant to take advantage of the show in my near-neighborhood in Northeast DC earlier this month.
It was certainly a memorable experience — perhaps one of the weirder and artier shows I’ve seen in awhile, one that challenged but also welcomed the audience. Taja Cheek, who records under the name L’Rain with her band, has a conventionally attractive and soulful singing voice, which she manipulates and distorts through a series of effects pedals and reverbs. Her band, comprising acoustic and electric guitar, keyboards, saxophone, and drums, plays attractively but skews all the songs with unpredictable touches. I can’t imagine what it must be like to learn these songs, with their off-kilter tempos and alternatingly pretty and disorienting melodies, frequently awash in drone and reverb.
You clearly hear influences of R&B, free jazz, electronic and ambient music, and sound collage
throughout the set, much of which came from
I Killed Your Dog (whose title song was the intro piece in the show). Because none of the music was previously familiar to me, I was always intrigued by snatches of what seemed like allusions to pieces I did know: There was an electric guitar piece that reminded me heavily of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint.” There was saxophone that might’ve come from the Jan Garbarek records on ECM. Some of drumming and keyboards in the more direct electronic pieces like
“Pet Rock" reminded me of Massive Attack’s “Risingson.”
Even though Taja Cheek is clearly the center of the show, L’Rain is also a band, and the players all have strong showcases. The drummer was phenomenal; the saxophonist (who doubled on keys) had some lovely moments and some pure skronk. I didn’t love the fact that Cheeks’ singing was deliberately bathed in reverb to the point of unintelligibility but I recognize that was part of her aesthetic. I actually found the vocals fascinating even though it’s difficult to ascertain the overall narrative arc of her songs or music. (Although Pitchfork did, in a recent
Best New Music.)
Despite the periodic inscrutability of the songs, the crowd was into it — it was a diverse audience; more Black listeners than most shows at Songbyrd, some Hispanic and Asian listeners. The audience skewed mostly pretty young, and every was well behaved, even the one dude in dreads who was clearly violating the anti-vaping policy — except a random 6’5’’ white dude dancing in the front of the audience, who was absolutely violating societal norms even if not any actual legal requirements. Cheek was delightful, as approachable and direct as her music is not. And as Cheek explained winsomely, she actually acquired a dog during the pandemic, who’s fine, and she’s never been associated with the deaths of dogs. It’s a metaphor.
Because shows are starting and ending earlier than they did before the pandemic, and I’ve tried to spend more evening hours with my family, I completely missed the opener,
Geologist from Animal Collective, and it was apparently a bonkers DJ set which I might have enjoyed (or not).
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/14/2023 11:39PM by zwirnm.
