Not content with running one of our favourite labels Fox Food Records, Mirfield’s James Smith also makes music under the moniker GOOD GOOD BLOOD. Back in March, we wrote about his début self-titled release, describing it as “six songs of gentle, lo-fi indie pop, both sort of sad and sort of not… generally a pleasure to listen to”. Now Smith has returned with a new EP, titled Hymnal, which continues in a similarly positive way.
The release opens with ‘The Pines’, which begins with an electronic strum (like a real-life version of the odd sound of fellow Fox Food alumni Sabbatical Wilderness) before being joined by sparse, echoing percussion and Smith’s gentle vocals. The song plays like the sort of conversation you have with a loved one when returning home from some happy event, heartfelt midnight melodrama triggered by a giddy buzz of goodwill and brief romanticism for life. As such, the song comes off as a statement of understanding, a commitment to another no matter what. When he sings “We are killing all the love we’re waiting for”, you get the impression ‘we’ is the most important word of all.
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‘Not Enough’ is more dramatic, the instrumentation simple and rhythmic, the hurried crashing of a digital sea as heard from beneath swells of ambient drone. Here Smith’s vocals are submerged within the texture of the song, flowing into spaces before ebbing away in time for the next surge. Natural rhythms are present in the lyrics too, detailing the twitchy yearning for more born of anxiety around separation and death, although this is done in second person, anchoring the song in a semi-omnipotent position of understanding. ‘Genevieve’ fumbles into existence, the weird whirs and idiosyncratic sawing clicking into sun-bright life, the track playing like a summer pop song put through the glitchy filter of some esoteric machinery. Closer ‘Our Father’ ends things on a restrained note, a quiet folk song of hushed vocals driven by a strangely insistent guitar. The lyrics detail how a simple and noble quest to escape loneliness instead sends heartache spiralling outwards like a contagion, a decision to pursue more acting as the first trip of a strange Rube Goldberg machine of solitude and grief.
“When our fathers wait
They will wait alone
When our sisters play
They will play aloneThey’ll mourn the son
With his blue
And he’ll be gone
Searching for new”
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You can buy Hymnal EP now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, and be sure to check out the previous Good Good Blood release too!
Cover photo by Catherine DeGennaro