Morgan le Fay contained multitudes. According to Arthurian legend, she was a Celtic healer and the ruler of Avalon, the magical island where King Arthur received healing from his sorceress half-sister, Morgan, after the fateful Battle of Camlann. In later myths, however, she was portrayed as a malicious force who plotted against her sibling and stoked chaos in his kingdom. Depending on which account you’re reading, Morgan could be a benevolent priestess, a spiteful enchantress, or an ambiguous mix of both. Her story became famous enough that she’s an etymological foundation in Italian folklore, whose magical concept of the fata morgana (the Fairy Morgana) refers to the optical illusion of a ship floating above the horizon. Taja Cheek also contains multitudes. As a musical artist, her work as L’Rain is restless yet assured, cutting-edge yet referential, beautiful yet unsettling. Prior records, such as 2021’s Fatigue and 2023’s I Killed Your Dog, displayed her poise for balancing the far-reaching ingredients of her music. Strokes-esque guitars on “Pet Rock” coexisted with foreboding vocal harmonies of “I Killed Your Dog.” The odd time signatures and ethereal atmospherics on “Find It” occupied the same world as the aggressively side-chained “Kill Self.” On fata morgana, L’Rain takes that omnivorous philosophy farther than she ever has. Lead single “soulless cycle” is among the most pronounced examples. It begins with a faint pulse, a kick that is more felt than heard, a core tenet of jazz drumming. L’Rain’s vocals float in the mix like featherweight clouds, and an amorphous guitar line rises into the ether like vapor off the sea. Not even a minute into the track, everything goes haywire. Crunchy guitars and rapid-fire drums subsume everything in their wake like a destructive waterspout. L’Rain’s vocals return, ushering the barrage of noise away for just a moment, repeating the phrase “I’m a psycho cycle,” losing herself in an elliptical maze of her own making. But as soon as the cacophony dissipates, it comes back with an even fiercer intensity. The drums go double-time, and a wall of feedback threatens to demolish all that lies in its path. It’s by far the heaviest song in L’Rain’s catalog, and you’d think its speed-metal impulses would seem out of place, but, magically, it feels right at home with the soft key arpeggios of “with time” and the ambient soul of “blue.” For an interdisciplinary artist like L’Rain, the boundaries of genre are porous—they’re places to explore rather than fences hemming her in. On “july 5th,” she sets up a transition that’s somehow both smooth and jarring. The track begins as a calm, drumless expanse. L’Rain’s syncopated vocals provide the rhythmic bedrock, and cinematic synths swell and recede, signaling a false ending that erupts when a Dilla siren heralds Screechy Dan, who arrives full force, energy level at ten, with an upbeat dancehall outro. He adopts the rhythmic cadence L’Rain uses for the bulk of the song, but he attacks the beat with joyous fervor, a tonal shift built on the same template. He sticks around for a minute or so until the ruminative guitars of “bedroom songs” gently usher him off the stage. Meanwhile, “borderline” reinstates that snaking, percussive tenor, grounding L’Rain’s impressionist, metatextual musings (“If you’re still counting, we’re overflowing / Climb like mountains with backwards wording”) with their fidgety verve. Across fata morgana, L’Rain constructs sonic realms that feel both tactile and freeform, a melding that assumes the spectral character of the optical illusion it derives its name from. It’s the type of record that can only come from an artist in total control of herself, one poised between the seemingly distant poles of the abstract and the concrete. But L’Rain shows us that those poles are closer together than they might seem. A perfunctory glance would add to the common misconception that these are two separate worlds, a verging path of mutual exclusivity, the kind of binary that insists Morgan le Fay can be either entirely good or entirely evil. fata morgana, however, urges us to take another, longer look. L’Rain shows us that those two worlds—pop and experimental, ambient and speed-metal, indie-rock and dancehall—can overlap as much as they disperse. A true magician, she reveals it was all just a trick of the mind’s eye. [Mexican Summer] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.