Puma Blue - Croak Dream

A year on from Puma Blue’s low-key releases ‘antichamber’ and ‘extchamber’, and almost three from previous full-band record ‘Holy Waters’, ‘Croak Dream’ comes with studio-based lore: that he - aka multihyphenate Jacob Allen - and production collaborator Sam Petts-Davies introduced parts of songs to the full band to work with in the room. Not a unique scenario, of course, but it just might be in this switch-up of Jacob’s working methods that the most interesting parts of his latest full-length lie.

For while his often melancholy, occasionally pretty, singing voice excels in projecting an inward-looking ennui (see ‘Heaven Above, Hell Below’ in particular for the OG jazz vibes, his use of vibrato and tone sitting in a cross-section of similarities with Jeff Buckley and Billie Eilish), it’s where sounds clash and contrast that the record’s intrigue and mood radiates most strongly. Take ‘Hush’, where tape crackles distort a piano to immediately create a filmic atmosphere on which a modern beat and crisp vocal sit: yes, it’s quite self-consciously Portishead in its result, but when has that ever been a bad thing? Elsewhere, there’s ‘Hold You’, where what one assumes is a wind instrument creates the sound of a creaking door; the title track, on which the ebb and flow of the band’s calamitous layering reaches full Radiohead status (alongside Jacob’s vocal bearing more than a passing resemblance to boot); and opener ‘Desire’, with its minimal-yet-dissonant clanging warring with a neo-soul vocal line to claustrophobic effect.

It isn’t all perfect. The arrangement of ‘Silently’ feels somewhat obvious, and its use of repetition is an irritant rather than hypnotic. (Even more so, given that ‘Cocoons’ balances a similar melodic predictability of its vocal line with a darker emotional heft - disconcerting, in the best way). Sonically both intricate and intimate, it’s smartly accomplished and at its best, conveys an immersive, dark mood.