Puma Blue
Croak Dream

THE REVIEW

Voluptuously, night descended on the horizon, clouding and quenching everything. Even the shadows.

The heart brimmed with funereal dreams.

Transcending with the jazzy beat of Croak Cream the very muffled pace of the night, as in the iconic darkness imagined by E. Steichen in his The Flatiron – Evening, bluish tones where everything is blurred, buildings and skyscrapers like ghost ships anchored in dusky, ink-dark twilights.

The night opened like an absent eye when Moon Undone began.

Liquid guitar, jazz sweating from the walls, an R&B that landed on the moon even before the Americans, with a bass line evoking slow celestial revolutions.

The phone vibrates.

You answer.

A low, cavernous voice that seems to say “I can’t sleep again”, but it might just be the darkness whispering.

Falling Down gravitates like an iron staircase in a basement. Stifled drums, a slow-throbbing, hopelessly sick bass. Angelic identities, genderless throats.

The night brings no solace.

Nor does it wound.

Celestial stasis, where the soul finds a thrill sweeter than frost; from the phone, whispers that seem uttered by poets fascinated by the abyss.

In Hounds, the guitars are fog-wrapped headlights, barely visible in the distance, the voice just an enveloping shadow.

On the other end of the phone, you try to say something, but the silence is stronger. A diabolical silence, as though someone were smiling in the dark without being seen.

Too Much, Too Much is a call that drops immediately. A whisper, perhaps “don’t fade away”, but the line breaks before you can believe it. The style never falters: nocturnal soul, evaporated jazz, R&B that has shed its skin and is now only spirit, smoke, breath. Dream arrives like a gust, temporarily clouding that window pane. Few notes. Fewer words. A confession that, in truth, does not wish to be heard.

You ask “are you there?”, but you only hear an echo, a delay, a trace of melody that seems to say “I’m still here” and, at the same time, nothing. Close-Fitting closes everything like a door you truly don’t want to open anymore. A brief phrase, maybe “stay with me”, maybe it was just a night breeze.

Maybe, in truth, you were never here.

You stay there, with the phone in your hand, the AMOLED screen lighting up the darkness, and the feeling that the voice never really hung up. It’s still there, in the night that brings neither joy nor pain, but keeps you awake like a secret unwilling to be confessed.

Croak Dream – Puma Blue.