PUMA BLUE - Croak Dream

The temptation to file Puma Blue's new album, a.k.a. Jacob Allen, under the label of retro can be strong, but the subject matter here isn't Seventies rock, punk, grunge, britpop or post-rock, but trip-hop, the one strain that still retains a vitality and a drive that refuses to be written off as passé. More than a dream, "Croak Dream" is a monochrome, aching nightmare, full of questions and devoid of answers, a single sinister, visceral, sensual, at times brutal groove, a declaration of love and death thrown at listeners with barely any filter, save for the eleven tracks unfolding as a single body. A record that ideally picks up the r&b humus of Grace Jones's "Slave To The Rhythm" and the soul of Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin On", and works it into a free-flowing energy reminiscent of Miles Davis's "Tutu", with a sound many will no doubt hastily compare to Portishead, but which has more complex roots that resist any neat, unquestionable pigeonholing.

Fidelity to the Nineties can nonetheless be traced more clearly in a number of "aesthetic" details, first and foremost the official video for the title track, whose graphics recall the video games of the era, alongside a genuine collector's treat (already sold out on Bandcamp): a limited-edition CD housed in a case resembling those of Playstation 1 games, complete with descriptions and artwork just like the ones mentioned above.

Every dream is a journey.

Who are you when wake up?

(from the back cover of the Video Game Edition of the album)

Allen's work remains unsettling even when it eases off some of its constant tension for a moment of levity (“Silently”); at the same time, it draws the listener in the way the sirens lured Ulysses, twisting the sound of the sax into a sharp screech and the voices into a muffled cry (“Hold You”).

Fans of strongly evocative songs will love the tremor of piano that opens into a trip-hop groove as solid and jittery as the one in “Hush”, but watch out for the traps scattered throughout, like the stillness of the subtle “Heaven Above, Hell Below”, caressed by the artist's voice, whose delivery recalls (and not only in that case) the style of Jeff Buckley.

A collection of intimate voicemail ballads (a term coined by a friend of the artist) that were never sent, "Croak Dream" reaches one of its peaks with the opener “Desire”, which lays out the engine driving the whole story and evokes passages à-la Nothing But Thieves filtered through Bristol sound, as well as the crackling guitar work of the title track, a genuine exorcism aimed at the object of the tormented protagonist's dark desire. Even so, the spectre will keep hovering over his mind, since waking up from a nightmare can sometimes be harder than being prey to dreams, and everything risks falling apart (“Mister Lost”, “Cocoons”).

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26/02/2026