Pale Bloom – Album Review

Lucy Kruger And The Lost Boys: Pale Bloom                  

(Unique Records)

Vinyl & Digital

Out Now

Exquisite polymathematical sounds from Berlin, now on album number seven and touring through the UK and Europe as we speak. MK Bennett soaks it in.

Fairy tales sell us our reality from a very early age, whether the original horrors of the unedited and cleaned-up Grimm or the nuanced take on societal violence of Lord Of The Flies, our early exposure to the later realities of life will leave some conscious or subconscious mark, regardless of what Disney may choose to dilute. Then there’s Bambi and Watership Down and all that accidental childhood trauma. Design or not, our innocent years are a minefield of dystopian nightmares disguised as harmless parables.

Lucy Kruger and the Lost Boys give us a clinical and soulful meditation on what lies just beyond, slightly out of reach, the worm inside the shiny apple. Opening with Bloom and the line “ Mary, Mary, quite contrary, why did your flowers never grow? “, an atmosphere of slight dread and nervous tension plays out through the perfectly pitched voice and the minor key guitar. The breathy vocals sound at all times like they’re in the room, removing the petals from flowers. It’s devastatingly dark and yet somehow joyous, like Beetlejuice or the bits of Wes Anderson movies that no one remembers. That’s just the first minute, as it progresses. The instrumentation both separates and locks in step and the drums arrive, which changes the song significantly, changing from Siouxsie goes to church into an almost Massive Attack adjacent groove. It works like a dream.

Damp maintains that bass led Bristolian vibe, to the point that you assume Tricky is about to unleash his glorious mumble but then Lucy starts to sing and it changes immediately. Her voice is pure gothic splendour and the absolute centre piece of the whole production, a returned Nico for these broken times. Near spoken and purely commanding, resting on the poetry of “ Is it love or a godly state “ as the guitar cuts through, before a delightfully sing-song middle eight and an achingly beautiful coda, the viola singing up to heaven. Like The Bad Seeds, The Lost Boys know exactly how to be, always simpatico with the boss, always colouring the narrative to a creative high. These boys are not lost; they are exactly where they should be, master painters for some Roman ceiling.

Ambient Heat is sexualised self-awareness, postmodern and shouting with impurity, noisy and then quiet, guitars squall and crawl into play then disappear like a child glancing around a corner, it is hypnotic and story-like and again the backing lies exactly where it should, always the right note, the exact brush stroke. The botanical theme that runs through the album is effective as metaphor and allusion, and Adder seems to be about loss and longing, the music plays out a different narrative, the clipped acoustics and almost hidden coos remain positive and draw out the highs.

Nectarine meanwhile, is a slow burn, building towards a sublime churchified slice of glory, an achingly beautiful piece of music full of secrets, lyrically and otherwise. It haunts and follows you, words of sublime, disturbing grace :

What is prayer
To a girl with no god?
But all the fear
You swallow with his name
At a very hungry age
What is girl?
Bit tongue, don’t run
Full of grace
A word so sweet
It blunts the hunter’s teeth
So full of doubt
Why don’t you spit the whole thing out?

Experience speaks a thousand languages, all understandable if you’re paying attention. It shows the brilliant subtleties the band can conjure, all the silence that is both filled and unfilled. Animal/Symbol is mystical and mythical, covering large amounts of ground in its two minutes, from early William Orbitesque electronica to Middle Eastern twang without drawing breath. Meanwhile, Lucy riffs around the words to Catch A Falling Star until it all fits like Lego. Reaching is next, almost funky, staccato and sharp before it briefly returns to Massive Attack, Mezzanine era this time or maybe Death In Vegas, that heavy brooding masculinity but tempered by Lucy’s voice, which lifts it immediately to other less travelled places.

Woolf, maybe Virginia and maybe lupine, with reference to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, starts quietly before pulsating into a different life halfway, it is brilliantly reminiscent of late period Bowie, with all the weight that implies, and fully deserves one of James Murphy’s epic remixes, should anyone have the appropriate phone numbers to exchange. Another perfectly judged choice of instrumentation and arrangement. Ghosts is a gorgeous soundscape, like The National or The Blue Nile and the recounting of a relationship, strength gained from self while you try to quiet the demons on behalf of others, it is another lyric of ache and empathy, of reaching for something:

Draw me near
I don’t want to hide
But something stubborn in this head and this heart
Thinks it’s safer if it splits and divides
Spine alert
Senses overpowered
You’re right there and you’ve told me you care
But there’s my curfew and a corner to cower

The bridge/verse that starts “Let’s go to Iceland “is heartbreaking in its yearning, leaving you breathless at its construction, a soft punch to the chest.

Anchor slinks and rumbles its way into view with its slight suggestion of religious mania and childhood trauma, another clever intro of melody closely following music, before a wonderful arrangement of sadness meets joy to rival Abba on The Visitors, as the strings swoon and pass overhead and the bass and drums try to dance away the heartache and the guitar tries to console. “Take me back and make me clean “, indeed. References to Joni’s Blue are entirely appropriate. Fawning is atmospheric, and the production, handled by Lucy, The Lost Boys and Andre Leo throughout is a masterclass in understatement and genuine class. The words, like all the lyrics here, are clever, dry and witty, suggestive and knowing. As is proven by Fawning, the narrative is at Cohen level, with references to kings and critics and not really meaning any of it, but even then, the double cross as the last words that echo past the perfectly scored music are, “Don’t forget me, don’t forget me..”. There’s a good deal of comparison between this and the late stage Leonard Cohen albums, always deadly serious and always taking the piss, because like him, she understands that memory is a myth.

A delightful and affecting album, grown-up yet stubborn it it’s childlike insistence on being on your radar, the least we can do is grant it an audience.

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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram