We’ve featured the music of Good Good Blood, the recording project of Fox Food Records‘ James Smith here several times at WTD. His most recent release, Motion | Sickness, “developed his luscious brand of experimental folk pop coloured with equal parts hope and melancholy” and now Smith is back with a new EP called Heart Land, what proves to be his most intimate and personal album to date.
In a recent interview with Trevor Elkin over at Gold Flake Paint, Smith revealed his recent issues with depression, and Heart Land marks a shift towards a more honest, transparent brand of songwriting. Despite being made in what Smith describes as “pretty much the lowest time in my life,” the EP is lighter than many previous releases, with opener ‘Never Doubt Us’ the perfect introduction, an instrumental of shifting, shimmering guitar.
‘Shake off the Present’ sees Good Good Blood doing what he does best, taking what’s essentially a folk song and running it through a twenty-first century filter – guitar and floaty atmospherics and crunchy percussion. The lyrics, which deal pretty explicitly with Smith’s recent mental health struggles, bring to mind the style of Strand of Oaks’ Timothy Showalter, self-deprecating in a heart-on-the-sleeve way and propelled by urgent momentum, as though drawing a certain joyous energy from the catharsis of exposing inner thoughts and feelings:
“I been riding around on the subway
feet are turning round and round
feeling like I let my whole family down
but I just cannot seem to shake of the present
worrying about the pas
knowing that my futile future ain’t gonna last”
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The title track sways with gentle percussion and buzzing keys, Smith’s vocals a soft croon, before the surprisingly bright ‘I’m So Ugly’, the guitar here like sunlight prismed through water droplets on the morning after a storm. Gathering momentum just beyond the minute mark, the song becomes what can only be described as a mournfully upbeat dream pop jam that defies its own lyrics (“I’m so ugly / you dare not hold me / I know, I know”).
‘Spiralling’ is another track that sounds deceptively buoyant, and a look at the lyrics raises the question as to whether the music is conquering the sadness or merely working to mask it (“here I go / spiralling / out of control / when did this begin? “). There’s also an audio sample of everyone’s favourite misanthrope, Bukowski, who we’ll quote at length because he gets at the kind of awful stasis of contemporary living, where freedom has been contorted into bars of its own and the struggle for identity and meaning is swamped by the well-worn script of adult responsibilities and should-dos:
“Generally speaking, you’re free until you’re about four years old. And then five arrives, then you go to grammar school and then you start becoming demented and solved and orientated and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have. If you have enough, of course, you retain some of it. But most don’t have enough so you become watchers of game shows, you know, and things like that.”
The release finishes on a second instrumental track which, despite its wordless nature, somehow rings as true as any of the others. An all-pervading drone rings bright and clear behind picked guitar and barely-there snatches of real life, the clatter of kitchen utensils, the cries of children, but mostly tape hiss and rustling movement. It’s delicate and pretty at first but soon becomes claustrophobic, a tinnitus-ridden paralysis that something like a view of the inside of your own head, life rolling by oblivious, as is its way.
You can get Heart Land now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page. All proceeds go to The Samaritans, so give a couple of pounds and everyone’s a winner.