vinylfanatics.com

**L'Rain - Fatigue ★★★★☆**

There's something profoundly unsettling about exhaustion as an art form, and Brooklyn-based composer Taja Cheek – the mastermind behind L'Rain – has crafted perhaps the most beautiful meditation on weariness since Nick Drake retreated into his bedroom studio. *Fatigue*, her sophomore effort for Mexican Summer, arrives like a fever dream filtered through gauze, all spectral vocals and disintegrating electronics that seem to dissolve the moment you try to grasp them.

Following 2017's self-titled debut – a fractured collage of field recordings, jazz fragments, and whispered confessions that announced Cheek as one of ambient music's most compelling new voices – *Fatigue* finds the artist wrestling with the weight of existence itself. The intervening years saw Cheek grappling with loss, creative blocks, and the peculiar exhaustion that comes from being perpetually switched on in our hyperconnected age. Rather than retreat into minimalism, she's responded by creating her most expansive work yet, a 40-minute journey through the liminal spaces between sleep and consciousness.

Musically, *Fatigue* exists in its own ecosystem, borrowing DNA from ambient techno, free jazz, and what might generously be called "deconstructed R&B." Cheek's background as a classically trained composer shows in the album's careful architecture – these aren't random ambient sketches but meticulously constructed soundscapes that breathe and pulse with organic life. Her voice, when it appears, floats like smoke through the mix, often processed beyond recognition yet somehow deeply intimate.

The album's centrepiece, "Blame Me," exemplifies Cheek's singular approach to songcraft. Built around a hypnotic drum pattern that sounds like rainfall on sheet metal, the track layers field recordings of conversations, manipulated vocal samples, and what might be a saxophone played through a broken amplifier. It's simultaneously the album's most accessible moment and its most alien, a pop song viewed through a kaleidoscope. Cheek's vocals emerge from the murk like a half-remembered melody, singing about accountability and self-doubt over a groove that seems to shift beneath your feet.

Equally mesmerising is "Two Face," where glitchy electronics collide with what sounds like a gospel organ played underwater. The track builds to something approaching catharsis before dissolving into static, embodying the album's central theme of emotional and physical depletion. It's followed by the brief but devastating "Suck Teeth," three minutes of manipulated vocal samples and field recordings that capture the frustration of miscommunication with startling clarity.

The album's opening salvo, "Fly, Die," sets the tone with its collage of street sounds, fragmented melodies, and Cheek's processed vocals discussing mortality over coffee shop ambience. It's like eavesdropping on someone else's anxiety dreams, uncomfortable yet compelling. Meanwhile, "Find It" closes the album with something approaching resolution – a gorgeous drift of sustained tones and whispered vocals that suggests peace might be possible, even in exhaustion.

What makes *Fatigue* so compelling is Cheek's refusal to offer easy comfort. This isn't ambient music designed to disappear into the background; it demands attention even as it explores themes of disconnection and numbness. The production, handled by Cheek herself with assistance from Booker Stardrum, creates spaces that feel both vast and claustrophobic, like being alone in a crowded room.

Since its release in 2021, *Fatigue* has established L'Rain as one of experimental music's most vital voices. The album has found champions among critics and fellow artists alike, with everyone from Björk to Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood citing Cheek's work as influential. More importantly, it's connected with listeners navigating their own periods of exhaustion and uncertainty, proving that there's something universally resonant about Cheek's very personal explorations.

In an era when "self-care" has been commodified beyond recognition, *Fatigue* offers something more valuable: an honest reckoning with the difficulty of simply existing. It's ambient music with teeth, a lullaby for insomniacs, a meditation on what it means to be tired in your bones. Taja Cheek has created something genuinely new here – music that sounds like how modern life feels.