Puma Blue: Blood Loss
review by hunter sanders
Puma Blue, Jacob Allen by day, is a multifaceted South London artist. From his bedroom he sends the most mysterious and alluring mixtures of poetry, lo-fi, and jazz. Calculated and reserved, Blood Loss, Puma Blue’s newest album, consistently hypnotizes and bewitches. It beckons, and draws the listener to another plane. Whether that plane is ethereal or infernal is harder to determine. Puma Blue’s vocals are masked and distant, creating the effect of a spirit voice, a ghost describing its myriad lives.
Yet, along with this ethereal vibe, the songs have a raw presence. Cut from live recordings and private sonic experimentation, Blood Loss strikes a chord for a conglomerated form of art, a collage of life, a full survey of hurt and suffering and hunger. Songs of ruin, in As-Is, songs of deep deep sexual longing in Lust, and general songs of the night, all in some way speaking to a desire for transcendence and yet of belonging and witness. To be seen by the Other but also to become it. Blood Loss, while haunting, is also primal and searching. Both the hunted and the hunter, Puma Blue is a paradoxical artist that always delights.
A demand for attention from the world, and a desire to meld with it, to fade into the gray night, swimming images of wine stains, fractured vignettes of murder and connections gone cold, Blood Loss is something deeper than an album. It was once said that Music is what poetry would be if it could, and somehow Puma Blue harnesses these poles of being, alienation and belonging, into a thick bewitching consistency. Blood Loss is the cure and inception of a delicious existential malaise, and just what the doctor ordered for a dark, cold, lonely winter.