On Bandcamp, every L’Rain album is tagged “not jazz.” It’s both a long-running bit and point of pride for multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek, founder and frontwoman of the wayward Brooklyn act. Although jazz informs the project’s improvisational spirit, Cheek prefers to describe her music as experimental, finding freedom in the openness of that label. That committed illegibility has empowered L’Rain to produce noise, R&B, shoegaze, folk, and whatever else Cheek fancies without being pigeonholed. “Make a way out of no way,” she chanted on 2021’s Fatigue, adopting a mantra for Black survival as her artistic creed. The only constant for L’Rain is change.
For her fourth studio album, Cheek pulls off yet another transformation. fata morgana, named after the optical illusion that causes distant objects to appear to float, is a work of exquisite phantasmagoria. Dense as a thunderhead in one moment, sheer as gauze in the next, the album teases and tests the ear. Diaphanous vocals blur into shimmering thickets of guitar feedback; soft drums evaporate into thrumming synths; breezy folk molts into pulsing dub. But this flux is always understated, the transitions obscured by the harmonies, the polyrhythms absorbed back into the spectral whole. It’s a ripe backdrop for Cheek’s tales of a world without consensus reality, where even the person in the mirror can be a ruse.
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Every L’Rain album is grounded in some core emotion, be it grief, burnout, or passion. The dominant feeling of fata morgana is doubt. Cheek speaks in riddles and questions everything, especially herself. “More times than not I mean not what I say,” a chorus of Cheeks sweetly sing on “glass ceiling,” melting into a scrim of guitar strums and exhalations. “Matters of my gross incompetence/I’m worse in confidence,” she murmurs on “borderline,” picking at insecurities like scabs. Beneath its plush grooves and butterfly-flap vocals, slow jam “birthday” oozes unease. “Ooh tell me, ooh tell me, I want my loving,” Cheek sings to herself. The song is less a celebration and more a hostage negotiation, Cheek twisting her own arm to care about her special day.
But all this fear, loathing, and suspicion feels good. Cheek and longtime bandmates Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz bury the malaise under layer upon gorgeous layer of instruments and vocals. There’s rarely any negative space or friction. Synth pads and guitar chords, singing and samples, rhythm sections and toplines all nestle together into a radiant lattice. The arrangements feel like a knitted blanket of light: warm, lucent, slightly unreal. In this uncanny environment, Cheek finds a strange peace. “Inside of me a bear/And antlers/Dissolving in love,” Cheek warbles on the funereal “church of no one,” her Auto-Tuned vibrato intensifying the trippy imagery.
Sometimes, the trio and their small army of collaborators choose fission over fusion, taking sharp turns. Take “july 5th,” a quietly scathing journey through the fata morgana of capitalism that finds Cheek peddling teeth-rotting food and bags of “tired souls” in the marketplace of “prickly little lies.” Instead of riding out the irony, the mellow folk track closes with a blast of optimism from dancehall deejay Screechy Dan, who toasts over a rickety dub beat that blips into the song just for his verse. “soulless cycle,” a pure headbanger, rages like no other song on the record—or in L’Rain’s catalog. Cheek outright shreds as speed-metal drums detonate around her. And yet it also slots right in, the singer delivering dread-filled, dadaist lyrics with an eerie calm: “Psycho, I’m a psycho cycle/I’m a psycho cycle, I’m a psycho cycle.” Even her tantrums feel like mirages.
