Photos by Katelyn Villon
On February 18, the Music Box settled into a languid haze. Silk slip dresses shimmered under dim lights with a pale luster as concertgoers gathered for Puma Blue, whose blend of jazz guitar, ambient textures, and falsetto vocals oozes a fragile sensuality perfectly suited to rooms like this.
Since the release of his debut EP, Swum Baby, Atlanta-based and London-born Jacob Allen has built a reputation for an altogether smoky, genre-blurring sound. With a catalogue as eclectic as his influences—Jeff Buckley, D’Angelo, Billie Holiday, and Björk—translating studio recordings to a live stage is no easy task. But Puma Blue managed it with surprising precision.
Backed by a five-piece band, the performance felt lush without becoming overcrowded. Allen handled vocals and rhythm guitar while the rest of the group filled out the room with keys, baritone saxophone, the usual bass and drums, and a refreshing variety of samples and electronic textures. The arrangement allowed the songs a comfortable degree of breathing room while still maintaining the layers that make the recordings so poignant.
Drawing from across Puma Blue’s dense catalogue, the setlist explored nearly a decade of material while still highlighting songs from his most recent release, Croak Dream. Though choosing favorites from such an undeniably rich set feels almost impossible, standout moments included “Desire,” “Too Much, Too Much,” “Oil Slick,” “Hounds,” and “Moon Undah Water”— tracks I would strongly recommend any curious listener seek out.
“Too Much, Too Much” in particular, I found to be especially enchanting. A five-minute lullaby-esque track from 2023’s Holy Waters, it’s minimalist even by Puma Blue standards, and honestly, one I didn’t expect to hear live. Yet as the opening synth line cascaded like snowfall and Allen chanted the opening, “My cup, my cup, runneth over with love,” I found my doubts pleasantly disproven.
What made this performance especially striking was how the live setting amplified the song’s emotional impact. While “Too Much, Too Much” has long been one of my favorites, the lo-fi murk of Puma Blue’s trademark production style can sometimes obscure the strength of his songwriting. Hearing it live, however, revealed a different clarity: the glassiness of the guitars, the full resonance of Allen’s tenor vocals, and the subtle interplay among the rest of the band's conflicting textures. Free from the haze of studio filters and effects, they seemed to dance and unfurl midair in a way I found to be quite breathtaking.
Despite the performance carrying a distinctly jazz-inflected sensibility, one of the most striking aspects of the set was Allen’s more experimental guitar work. With a pedalboard that would make even the most devoted shoegazers jealous, he crafted swells of reverb and delay that washed over the room. During the closing moments of “Hounds,” for example, a single stomp (of what looked to be a Boss DD-20) sent the guitar dissolving into a rising cloud of sound before cresting into a slow, shimmering crescendo. Alongside Allen’s vocals, which somehow sound even more impressive live, it was one of the best examples of a studio sound translating effectively to the stage I’ve seen.
With a mixture of grace and restraint, Puma Blue filled the Music Box with the lingering resonance of falsetto and a slow-burning decadence of sound, leaving the room suspended in the same languid haze in which the night began.
