Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys new album A Human Home came from an idea to “gather poems, sketches, and different artistic expressions from friends and family exploring their experience of isolation and to use those as starting points for songs” and was borne out of a desire to bring other people into the creative process “acknowledging how much of home lies not only in place, but in the people we love.”
It’s a terrible irony that a global pandemic was the not only the catalyst for artists to work around the restrictions of isolation but also challenge the way they worked. Some artists, like Lucy Kruger, were able to find a way of tapping into introspection, contemplation and experimentation to create something captivating,
“When you are still long enough, anything can become an object of contemplation. During the lockdown, my room became the centre of the story for a moment, and I became a part of it’s changing the narrative. The furniture felt more alive than I’d allowed it to be before. I wondered about all it had experienced and all it had witnessed. Bodies, objects, temperature, and time leave marks on physical objects. It gave me space to think about the kinds of marks we as humans leave on the world and one another. The inevitability of indents and impressions. The beauty and the devastation. How casual, how causal, how cauterising, how crucial.”
There is a listless beauty to the tracks as they slowly unfold and, where there could be a sense of claustrophobia from the circumstances, it seems to use the stillness of the world to explore what Kruger calls “a body in a room in a city in a world in a universe in a city in a room in a body.” The guitar that Kruger would normally write with did not become the starting point for many of the songs, and the conceptual nature of the work – using stimulus from friends and family – led to a “naïve and feeling-based exploration” using drum sounds and synths alongside inviting friends in to play on the album.
Lucy Kruger has a conversational intimacy to the way she sings which feels like it is happening now and only for you. There is a warm zephyr in her singing style, from the liminal inhalations and exhalations to the soft rush of air breathed into her vocal performance and the light distortion of the metronomic guitar lines sometimes colours the voice. Musically, the album has an otherworldly quality which often floats between major and minor and can be quizzical, sometimes crepuscular, and most definitely dreamlike.
A Human Home gives the impression of visiting an exhibition in the mind of the artist. We are not only seeing their finished works but all the scrap paper notes and sketchbooks outlining their processes. As a listener it’s a privilege to sit with Lucy Kruger in her Berlin room and be allowed to drift through her imagination.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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