For the first few years of his career, Puma Blue – the artist name of Jacob Allen – was perhaps most recognised for his synthetic bedroom experiments, where tales of modern melancholy met smoky rhapsodies of devotion. On debut album ‘In Praise Of Shadows’, released in 2021, Allen reached for atmospheric dimensions whilst retaining the loungey minimalism of his early EPs. On new album ‘Holy Waters’, Allen brings intensity and dynamism to mournful laments by exploring his technical reach as a bandleader. Recorded over two visits to Eastbourne’s Echo Zoo Studios, ‘Holy Waters’ see Allen work through the vestiges of grief, inertia and the prison of one’s own mind, and the result is a suite of songs headier, richer and more sharply delineated than what’s come before.
‘Hounds’ is the most striking example of Allen’s fraternal synergy with his live band; Luke Bower on guitar, Cameron Dawson on bass, Harvey Grant on sax and keys, Cameron Dawson on bass and Ellis Dupuy on drums. A trip-hop, space-rock combo, ‘Hounds’ offsets Allen’s narrative framing of despondency and isolation from the outside world through interdependent co-productions. Lyrically, ‘Holy Waters’ is a sprawling affair excavating intergenerational relationships. Allen can be elliptical and imagistic, like on ‘Epitaph’, a hallowed entreaty to his late grandmother brought to life through patched-together anecdotes and recollections of lived moments. ‘Gates (Wait For Me)’ follows, conceived as a riposte to ‘Epitaph’ from the perspective of his deceased grandfather – a marathon composition built around a funereal Hammond organ. Lyrically direct and taut, Allen underpins the emotional pull of the song through a dexterous hand-off between rolling drums and stunning piano progressions.
The eleven tracks on ‘Holy Waters’ takes the listener on a turbulent but redemptive voyage through a bereaved psyche. These songs feel like visitations from ghosts; be it lost friends, kinfolk or the incorporeal phantom figures that cloud Allen’s vision of himself. Allen oscillates his voice as he grapples with the possibility of life and the finality of death; his vocal breathy, distant, disembodied or clear and close when moving through emotional registers, like the feral flourish ‘O, The Blood!’, a hypnotic, noirish tribute to ‘Dummy’-era Portishead and Bristol rock virtuosos.
‘Holy Waters’ is an act of self-reclamation from the enveloping mire of grief, explored in non-linear, discursive notes. Death isn’t treated as a macabre entity but an inevitability, and Allen soundtracks this journey from hollow despair to eventual rebirth. When the shadows loom larger, Allen centres his emotional anchors, breathing life and levity into songs like ‘Pretty’ which recall the torch-bearing feel of 2017’s ‘Swum Baby’; a tender folk-ballad painting a more effulgent patina of nights and mornings spent in the presence of his partner’s refuge. Backed by the might of a synchronised band, Puma Blue confronts his heartbreak head on; the result is a dark, sultry and minor-key triumph through melancholia to a place of salvation.
8/10
Words: Shahzaib Hussain
—
—
