Album Review: fata morgana by L’Rain
Three years after the anti-break-up record I Killed Your Dog, Taja Cheek turns stalled starts, hungry love, and family communion into one continuous thought.
For most of the past decade, Taja Cheek has been behind some of New York’s most adventurous concert programming. As the talent booker at MoMA PS1, she brought experimentalists to stilt-walk at Warm Up or transpose avant-garde soundscapes to the drones of Sunday Sessions. These days, she’s at the helm of Performance Space New York in the East Village. Through it all, she’s released her own music—for the 2021 album Fatigue and the 2023 LP I Killed Your Dog, an anti-break-up record. Cheek’s third album, fata morgana, takes a different tack, synthesizing dancehall, tape meditations, slow jams, gospel, and crunched metal to tessellate the way a person can grow in a world not built for them to thrive in.
Cheek begins, like a stammer, in a four-line fragment introduced as “rumors of light”: the same four lines, versions of the same stalled sentence—”I keep trying to start the/Start.” Then it’s on to “with time”: another verse of proverbs, time doing it, the sun being all we see, all buying seeming easier; two tears that’ll replace the true love you never cried. Like a host returning from a commercial, a voice starts in just a moment and asks you to wait right here—that voice stays the whole drama of the song, where she can go when morning comes, where she hides her face and bites the bait, where it reassures her she’s not done yet.
The briefs of the songs really say, all in all, what she’s been through. Even in “blue,” where she closes her eyes, opens them wide, and feels like dying and that the secrets are “inside me lying lonely,” yet still, near the end, she turns to someone and asks, “Who am I to you?” In “glass ceiling,” consisting of three lines in full, she has a smile hiding her fear, closed eyes, learning she has to be brave, then asks, “But, why does it hurt so bad? To live out my days?” In “soulless cycle,” her drive is the same about being so tired of being so tired, so sorry she’s feeling so sorry, calling herself a psycho cycle.
With “july 5th,” the tiredness gets an actual target: Someone who doesn’t care what they’ve been sold. The opening is directed against the “cartel” who “found a bag of tired souls” and who “sell a million little lies and ten-year-olds.” Then tell her to pull the stakes so she can lose what she holds (“It’s a life I never lived”). And then there’s a second voice that appears in patois and preaches back just as hard: Apparently, the whole scheme is not buying either, and he’s sending the lies to hell. The closest thing to a commandment he gives: “Get up and press delete on that repeat and free up yourself.” The wicked will take your health (your wealth). Glitter can be bitter. The powers of the Most High remain active out there.
Freeing yourself is one job; not ruining the lives of the people you love is another. The love in these songs, baring its teeth, is a blessing (“elmyra”), but also a curse (“Like gripping the doorway/Withstanding tornados/I’m with you/My bare teeth”). The vow at the center of “i remember” is softer and yet known too well at once. And the painfully bruised, soulful “birthday” is right to insist on an answer to the question it asks again and again in its hook, where each variation of which is a new way of saying the same thing, but gives it up instantly in one verse. The occasion comes up for grabs, and then it’s settled.
On “borderline,” the wanting is not only present but openly territorial, half disgusting, two-thirds relieving, no matter “if you’re still counting.” We hear a countervoice behind the chorus, chanting this strip of land is in our design. Ever so slowly, love becomes and is drawn up like a border dispute. In the second verse, Taja Cheek expresses her own gross incompetence: unsure if wanting is “beast or sustenance,” she places the blame on matters of time. If communion is practiced in “church of no one,” the birthday is addressed to an unknown judge. Body parts are distributed—eyes in the hands, mouth in the ankles, heart in the being. Everything is bare, endless, dissolved in light. Inside that dismemberment come the loneliest lines on the record: “Out here in these days with nobody/Don’t know nobody/Only I decay.”
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “july 5th,” “soulless cycle,” “church of no one”