Laura Kerry
L’Rain is Brooklyn-based Taja Cheek, an artist who channels classical training in piano and cello into complex and noisy experimental pop. Her self-titled debut is a kaleidoscopic swirl of voices, rhythms, and sounds that push and pull, swell and simmer, leap and lament. It’s a collection of things that probably shouldn’t coexist but have somehow fallen into the right place.
Be warned, though, that you shouldn’t expect to find exactly where that place is. In L’Rain, the music has to come to you. Amid dense arrangements of reflective synths, intricate guitar lines, layered voices (sometimes soulful and pretty, sometimes twisted with eerie effects), spurts of horns, samples of street noise, and other unpredictable sounds, it’s best to relax into Cheek’s world and trust where she takes you.
At times, the result can be disorienting. The songs on the album have unconventional structures propelled by changes in mood, sonic breakdowns, or complete relocations into new soundscapes. One moment, you might be in the warm swirl of synth and cascading guitar in “Heavy (But Not in Wait),” and the next, at the beginning of “Stay, Go (Go, Stay),” you will find yourself exiting a car as a raw and beautiful voice sings softly; you will start in a psych-pop jam on “A Toes (Shelf Inside Your Head),” and end in the same song in glitchy art-pop; and “Go, Stay (Stay, Go),” the mirror of the second song, completely turns you around with its backwards audio. Also disrupting the listener’s sense of bearings are the clever ways in which L’Rain transitions from song to song, bleeding endings into beginnings, as in the sinister child sample and carnival synth at the close of “Bat” and start of “Alive and a Wake.”
In an album marked by the exuberance of noise, the clearer, quieter moments carry particular weight. Those grow even heavier in the context of the album’s creation; the artist was in the middle of recording when her mother, Lorraine, died, and Cheek’s album title and stage name are a tribute to her. Though L’Rain contains no dominant sentiment, it offers up glimpses of grief and reflection—in the meditative flutter at the end of “Which Fork / I’ll Be,” in the wailing horn on “Heavy (But Not in Wait)”, and, most achingly, in the birthday voicemail, completely untouched, called, “July 14th, 2015.” If you’re looking for sadness in the album, odds are you will find it. L’Rain leaves room, though, for the many other insane and incongruous parts of grief. It’s possible that there’s even a place for joy and transcendence in it, too.
If you’re looking for anything in L’Rain, it’s likely you will find it. By embracing deliberate but unfettered experimentalism in her debut, the artist opens up her strange and rich world, in turn allowing the listener the same freedom to explore. The ride can be unnerving, but the rewards are great.