Puma Blue

Swum Baby E.P.

(Inner City Float)

8/10

Take the softness of Elliot Smith’s sincerity and sadness, the warmness of Jeff Buckley’s longing; add a pinch of Chet Baker’s pitch perfect pipes and stir lightly with Mac Demarco and Tommy Guerrero’s stoner grooves and you will pretty much have Puma Blue, a.k.a. Jacob Allen presented before you.

Swum Baby is five tracks of sparse, D.I.Y. soundscapes, jam-packed with emotion, bliss and beauty.

The E.P. starts and ends with my personal favourite tracks: (She’s) Just a Phase, a gentle, floating musical feather that tickles your ears, while the singer tries to convince himself and us that the “creature of my desire” is “easy to replace”. The words trickle out mournfully and passionately, though I suspect, if my interpretation of Puma Blue’s pining is true, he may need to take the subject matter back to his therapist to get proper closure.

Want Me is wonderfully dreamy yet haunting. The brush strokes meander around the soft and frilly, catchy chorus like a slow trickling stream; making for a perfect end to an unfeigned and heart-felt extended player. 

By Richard Bamford

                                Don’t Exist by Richard Bamford 

       I just want to go to sleep,  

      To disappear into the sheets.  

      To quiet the noise inside my skull,  

      and make it numb and make it dull.  

      It’s easier to not resist, the feeling I should not exist.  

      Self-loathing scratches at my face,  

      I want to dissolve without a trace.  

      The seething hate, the tears within,  

      Nobody can judge when my light is dimmed.  

      It’s easier to not resist, the feeling I should not exist.  

      The anger that I have suppressed,  

      Is fighting back and crushed my chest.  

      Just close my eyes and drift away,  

      Unless I can release this rage.  

      I can accept and clear this mist,  

      I can choose to embrace that I exist.  

  

A poem about Generalized Anxiety Disorder:

I Scare Myself.

by Richard Bamford

A litre of water seeps from my face,

My stomach ties knots,

My heart quickens its pace.

Intestines clenched and bladder squeezed,

My mouth is dry like a dying tree.

But what is the cause of this behavioural mess,

With thoughts and feelings in distress?

I scare myself and regress to child,

Replaying emotions, I once had filed.

I feel on edge; my body on parole.

What will it take to gain control?

This story playing in my mind,

To the present moment I am blind.

My hearing’s heightened like a fleeing fawn,

I’m running from these images I’ve drawn.  

I scare myself I know that now,

My breathing’s shallow – I wipe my brow.

I close my eyes and inhale a breeze,

A sigh of clarity as the paranoia leaves.

I have returned; I’m here; I’m now,

My heartrate’s calming, I don’t know how,

I feel my feet upon the ground,

No longer attuned to every sound.  

I scare myself, that’s what I do,

But I don’t have to and nor do you.

The Heliocentrics - A World of Masks

A World of Masks
The Heliocentrics
Soundway Records
4/5
By Richard Bamford

Sometimes a record really surprises you and surpasses your expectations. I’ve been digging Malcom Catto and The Heliocentrics for a few years now but their new album, A World of Masks, really blows my goose-pimples’ socks off. I stick the platter on the turntable and let the stylus gently kiss the groove. Subtle sounds seep from my speakers and bounce off my walls. But wait, this isn’t the psych jazz funk rock I was expecting; this is different. The Helio’s, it seems, have picked up a vocalist: Barbora Patkova. Babs’ Slovakian song soaks up the improv’ grooves with a porous embrace. Could this be The Heliocentrics missing link? My initial pull to this band were the masterful and manic drums. I can say this because I’m a drummer: Malcolm Catto is a fucking brilliant drummer. I’ve seen him live and I’ve listened to his work on a multitude of projects. The man can play them tubs. With The Heliocentrics debut, Out There, Malcolm’s rhythms were almost exhausting to keep up with, and bafflingly impossible to copy, but, on A World of Masks he’s no less tight, snappy and crisp, he’s subtle and set back, slightly. The man’s a human metronome and still guides each song as they’re neatly and sweetly interconnected with precision, but this gentler approach works to the band’s credit and enhances Babs’ soothing chants to an end that steers this away from an improv’ style to a more succinct body of work. A World of Masks isn’t just a classy jazz piece, it’s a multifaceted, multi-cultural masterpiece that whisks you around the globe and back again, picking up influences from Turkey, Morocco and Slovakia along the way. A World of Masks is released on Soundway Records on the 26th May.