I Killed Your Dog

The inevitable ‘best of 2023’ listicles that proliferated on-line a couple of weeks ago served as a reminder of just how little new music I’d listened to this year. Feeling older is inescapable, but one can very easily forget just how out-of-touch one is. Of the dozen or so new albums I have heard in full during the year so far, my current favourite is one that made an appearance on several of those lists: I Killed Your Dog by L’Rain.

Much was made, in the press accompanying the album’s release, of how different it is in terms of mood and subject-matter from the same artist’s previous record (Fatigue: 2021; as mentioned on my old blog here). Indeed it is a brighter and cleaner affair, including some tracks – like ‘5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)’ and ‘Clumsy’ – which would have sounded quite out of place on the last album. My first impression, however, was of the similarities between the two releases, of their shared sound-world and the consistent compositional ‘voice’ in which they both speak.

I love I Killed Your Dog every bit as much as I loved Fatigue, which is just as well, as certain aspects of its release irked me. Again, it was not made available on CD, and I somewhat resented paying £27 for a piece of plastic in a paper sleeve in a cardboard one. The paper sleeve, moreover, wasn’t even usefully anti-static. My copy was on coloured vinyl, in a shade optimistically called ‘oxblood’. While it can look vaguely reddish on the turntable, held up to the light it seems to me a translucent shade resembling magenta, quite unlike anything an ox might bleed.

I should perhaps add, by way of disclaimer, that your dog is almost certainly fine, and, if not, it was nothing to do with me.