For those who need reminding, Good Good Blood is the solo project of James Smith, the friendly face behind one of our favourite labels, Fox Food Records. We’ve covered the entirety of his releases to date, marvelling at the balance between real-world angst and a sort of airy optimism which seems embedded with Smith’s songwriting, what we described in our review of O Belong as “bright and honest hope in the face of uncertainty”. As we continued, “the majority of the lyrics take the form of questions, but these don’t feel like angst-filled pleas, rather a kind and loving promise to carry on no matter what.”
Passing Place is a new six-song EP that Smith wrote between March and May of this year. ‘The Dawn Chorus’ opens with a gentle ambient swells before the entrance of Suzy Jivotovski’s trumpet, heralding a beginning better than any morning birds. The title track follows with an up-tempo clamour, though the AM feeling perseveres, Smith’s vocals hazy and soft and supported by trumpet which lifts in quiet triumph, replicating dawn optimism. ‘Not the Answer’ sees a slight shift, the mood falling a few shades darker, Smith’s lyrics pushing things darker still. That said, the song never becomes gloomy, the music acting as a counterbalance to his words, preventing them from slipping beneath the surface.
“Praying for tomorrow
Today has brought
Nothing but loss
Your loving holds my sorrow
And I am so lost
And at the cost
Of the morning frost
My holocaust”
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The darkness should continue on ‘No Sadness/Furrowed Brow’, though once again an inexplicable sense of optimism seeps through the cracks. Here we find a narrator troubled by death and urging a lover to continue without him (“When I’m gone / Live a long life”), a subject which should be melodramatic at best, though with help once more from Jivotovski’s trumpet Smith manages to make it golden, shifting the focus from death onto life, from self onto other. The instrumental ‘Flowers in the House’ follows with jubilant church bells before closer ‘Vessels & Vapours’ draws us back into love-driven anxieties, the narrator willing his lover to move on without him. Again you get the sense the words are drawn from intimacy and tenderness as opposed to self-pity, the final words of a ghost too light and free to think of himself, too fond not to think of his other.
“And when they
Turn over all the embers
Oh I know you
You’ll not be far away
And you’ll be torn two
The vessels that your blood flows through
Are strained capillaryGo, go, oh please go
And leave me here alone”
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While, with all its desperate pleading and introspection, it’s hard to describe Passing Place as a happy album, it does possess a certain joy that bubbles from each song. And it’s this feeling that stays with the listener, lingering in the mind, maybe helping them stand a little straighter or look a little harder for the light in their lives. To mix the metaphor of the closing track, Passing Place is almost like a ship sinking in reverse, a vessel damaged and stressed but not defeated, the hull shedding the weight of water and bobbing to the surface, battered and bruised and barnacle-ridden, but touched by sunlight for the first time in too long.
You can buy Passing Place now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, including, as always, on a rather lovely cassette (but be quick, they’ve almost gone!).