A record about how you would live if the time and circumstances of your own death were revealed to you in a dream – God knows there are more edifying concepts than the one that Jacob Allen aka Puma Blue chose for his new album. Despite all the memento mori on CROAK DREAM, the British songwriter still has nothing to do with the death-longing gothic world, especially not musically.
While HOLY WATERS, his first full-band album, was a wonderfully sinister affair between trip-hop power and jazzy creaminess, after forays into acoustic and ambient music he is now returning to the fantastic sound of these hallowed waters on the experimental records ANTICHAMBER and EXTCHAMBER, released in 2025.
This is a great blessing, because life in the face of death has hardly ever been sung about in such a beguilingly vital way as with the provocative pillow talk of “Desire”, the beat-volume racing title song or the crisp breakbeats of “Jaded”. Otherworldly good!
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.
