“I’ve been trying to make peace with death,” smiles Jacob Allen, the singer-songwriter, producer and poet better known as Puma Blue, bashfully aware of the abstract stateliness his avowal holds. “It’s horrible and it’s painful. I’d never say that it isn’t. Yet at the same time, the process of it all can be beautiful.” Death nestles like a sweet creature at the heart of Holy Waters, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2021’s In Praise of Shadows, set for release this Autumn via Blue Flowers. It’s less a morbid study in mortality, more a chronicle of the graciousness within each repeated cycle of life, death and rebirth, arriving eventually at a gentle affirmation to himself, to the listener, at the album’s close, to keep going, “don’t let the dark take you whole”. It’s the hope-tinged bleakness that gets you.
