»Soundtrack to a film never made«, »music to accompany an imperial lifestyle«, »dandy’s heady fantasy in paranoid mode« – these claims or ones like them could be found on the hype stickers that Lucas Croon sticks on the sleeve of »Hals und Kopf«. Instead, there is an image of him hanging on the phone next to a grey coastline framed by vanilla-coloured cream. Lucas Croon already knew how to project a certain level of understatement when he released his »Schlachthof Aufnahmen« EP in 2016. On it, beautiful melodies met unpredictable twists and turns and modest instrumentation oscillating between analogue and digital. His debut album now incorporates an eclectic palette of sounds from five decades in a similarly light-footed manner without seeming to stumble. On it, he flexes his production muscles for almost an hour with an extraordinary display of timing, timbre and cinematic dramaturgy.
Steeled by years as a resident at the »Düsseldorf Salon des Amateurs«, on »Hals und Kopf« he successfully manages to square something like several circles: Downtempo and Balearic beat, cosmic music and synth funk, style-conscious retro-futurism and spirited sampling blend together in a journey through decades gone by, while keeping 2023 firmly in the rear-view mirror. It’s a carousel in perspective style, where everything refers to something spontaneously obvious and is connected in a new way – somewhere between club and headphones. Similar to artists like Niklas Wandt, Nils Herzogenrath and Wolf Müller aka Jan Schulte, Lucas Croon once again proves himself to be a real pro at reworking contemporary melodies that love to dress up new ideas in nostalgic clothes and are literally brimming with style. Not a lot of people manage to do that – but here it has worked out better than it has at any other time this year.
Hals Und Kopf
