With fata morgana, there’s a case to be made that L’Rain is the best and most purest guitar-based experimental rocker we’ve heard this past decade. To get that accolade, you need to be a creative vessel of singularity, and that is she which Taja Cheek has consistently done now across three albums in sonic matter that can only come from a complex, unique psyche.

The sound which the Brooklyn songwriter cultivates is no mirage to the listener’s’ conscious, however. Despite the listen distorting gravity and reality through a multiplicity of layering effects, shape-shifting pedals, and formless rhythmic patterns, fata morgana taps into Cheek’s own self-wandering wonderings through her most dense offering to date. It will require of its listener to rest with it in some form of stillness or meditational state to ensure its spectral energy consumes you wholly. Once it does, the sensory reaction is transcendent.

Consider its lead single and late-blooming focal point “soulless cycle” a red herring, with its chaos designed in repetitive movements of refrain, noise-punk feedback, and speed accelerants being the album’s peak of momentum. The surrounding listen made from a whole of its parts — though multi-faceted in texture and style — is a more darkly ambient exploration inward, though always pulling its way toward the light in varying wavelengths.

Low-lit, blinkering synths like those heard within “with time”, and the ability to warp cosmic jazz and rap-poetry into a whole new beyond state in “blue” and “i remember” anchor fata morgana‘s unstable core. Seeping its way toward that energy is the sun being reciprocated into L’Rain’s radiance-on-the-verge on the psychedelic spooled “july 5th”. Off-kilter, lo-fi finger-picking weaves openings around orb-like synths pads through a “borderline” and “glass ceiling”, and on “elmyra” and “birthday”, Cheek’s sumptuous, silken flow in her own version of alternative R&B balms any discord internally.

“I am the church of no one / Your eyes are in your ears now,” she sings on the album’s supernaturally spiritual vex of a closer, “church of no one”. Lonely as L’Rain may be in her state of mind, her being individually through what she creates is not lost forever as the listen decays into stardust. You will find yourself in this new reality, too, if your eyes and ears meet her there.

Highlights: “july 5th”, “elmyra” “soulless cycle”

L’Rain’s fata morgana is available now on Mexican Summer.

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