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Limited 2LP : 180gm Milky Clear Vinyl
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‘In Praise of Shadows’ is a delirious dreamland of soulful vocals, D’Angelo-ish guitars and muted electronic beats. Its fourteen tracks are a contemplation on “the balance of light and dark, the painful things you have to heal from or accept, that bring you through to a better place” says the 25-year-old Puma Blue, real name Jacob Allen “It’s about finding light in darkness - and realising that it’s what got me here today.”
Puma Blue’s nocturnal, soul-searching sound was born from a decade in which the 25-year-old was plagued with insomnia, “for literally a decade, I just couldn’t sleep,” says the cult-acclaimed London songwriter/producer. That certainly helps to explain the hazy, late-night “voicemail ballads” of the early EP releases that propelled him to prominence, 2017’s ‘Swum Baby’ and 2018’s ‘Blood Loss’ earning him a reputation as affecting chronicler of unrequited love and inner turmoil.
It’s an intimacy still present across ‘In Praise With Shadows’ but there’s also a new maturity and lucidity to the way in which Allen deals with his demons and celebrates beauty across his debut album, influenced no doubt by his journey over the last two years in which a blossoming romance has finally helped him to sleep whilst a burgeoning career forced the previously bedroom-bound songwriter out into the open, driving him to find new perspectives on loss, love and everything in-between.
The result is an album astonishing in its openness, from bittersweet reflections on past relationships - “I never learnt to cherish her” Jacob laments on ‘Cherish (furs)’ - to pure love-laden soliloquies such as ‘Already Falling’ or ‘Sheets’, one of the albums most personal moments, which borrows a sample from the score of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and repurposes it as a lilting love-song that Allen describes as “like a really personal note that you’d leave in the house to be found when you’ve got to head out early.”
Nowhere is that openness more apparent though than on lead single ‘Velvet Leaves’, released today. Propelled by a crisp hip-hop beat and culminating in reverb-drenched wails reminiscent of one of Allen’s biggest influences, Jeff Buckley, the track explores an incident that still leaves him near panic attacks today. He wrote the beat and the lyric in the same session as he channeled that experience into his music.
Tracklist
1 Sweet Dreams
2 Cherish (furs)
3 Velvet Leaves
4 Snowflower
5 Already Falling
6 Sheets
7 Olive / Letter To ATL
8 Oil Slick
9 Silk Print
10 Is It Because
11 Opiate
12 Sleeping
13 Bath House
14 Super Soft
Soundwave
https://youtu.be/aowdkl7JhNM