Jacob Allen takes a new turn on the latest Puma Blue album, reaching deep into 90s influences in both music and film. With elements like trip-hop reminiscent of Massive Attack’s Blue Lines album, hypnotic instrumentation, and breathy vocals redolent of some of Radiohead’s older work (not surprising since their co-producer and mixer is Sam Petts-Davies who has worked with Thom Yorke), Puma Blue surpasses himself and previous albums in both production and thematic depth.
“Desire” opens with a jazz-tempoed take on their signature soft romanticism, proffering Allen’s dulcet, swooning vocals and gentle bass in a tempo that feels both urgent and relaxed, like a racing heart when you’re trying to play it cool despite the panic in your chest. By the bridge, the track gallops into something larger, alluding to the edge and tempo of what is to come on the rest of the album.
The previous track shatters into “Mister Lost”, which chugs along like an old printer, redolent of the 90s, a decade that decorates the album’s aesthetic at its core. It plays like a sequence from Fight Club, when Tyler Durden is staring into the camera through trembling, vertiginous distortion. The rest of the track elicits the same disorientation, its nuances amplified as the mechanical rhythm halts and resumes beneath Allen’s plaintive, poetic musings, drifting over melancholy synths.
The titular track, “Croak Dream” immediately airlifts us back into the 90s with diaphonous textures reminiscent of Massive Attack or something out of a Matrix film. Arguably the most sonically intriguing track on the record, Allen explains, “A Croak Dream is a prophetic dream where you see a vision of how you die.” The song loses us in tangles of scratching electric guitar and oozing reverb. Chaos gradually ameliorates into clarity, like a blurred dream sharpening into lucidity. It feels like a fever dream, like falling off a cliff or tumbling ceaselessly down a rabbit hole, with nothing to grip, dizzying and desperate. Slowcore infused with jazz undertones, it circles and confronts its refrain: “This is the death, this is the death.”
So many of these tracks ponder and allude to the concept of death; the undeniable closing of our perceived infinities, which we know already exists in a time and place untraceable until we arrive there. Allen wrestles desperately with these musings in “Heaven Above, Hell Below”, the track dripping denial, but these concepts of death force him also to confront his life, and how he is living the rest of his days, “the funniest thing we have is the choice to do with all of this spare time,” he sings. Death becomes less of an ending and more of a perspective, sharpening the urgency of presence.
“Hush” returns to their signature dream-jazz ambience, with Rhodes-toned piano, restrained bass, and a trickling, eerie saxophone that slips in and out like a warning, or a reminder. The jazz elements are somewhat reminiscent of Greentea Peng’s album, GREENZONE 108. Once again, Allen muses on the effects of an inevitable end of a seemingly infinite present: “When every memory is licked with rust.” The realisation is chilling, as though time itself has the capacity to corrode our illusion of permanence, of memory; the only things time allows us to cling to. Is it a blessing or a curse? Would we choose the burden of memory, or the freedom of ignorance?
Despite the insinuating title, their album is ultimately about duality. Like the phrase memento mori, which lexically refers explicitly to death, its primary purpose is to remind us how to live. “Half the songs on this record allude to how you might decide to live, act, if you somehow knew your awaiting fate,” Allen explains. Perhaps encouraged by dreams he has had, he explores the weight of finitude and its effect on our consciousness, our decisions, and our relationships. Just as dreams are a place suspended between consciousness and oblivion, Croak Dream oscillates between darkness and light; a grappling with mortality and the unknown, in a way that feels intimate and expansive.
