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”

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 capillary

Go, go, oh please go
And leave me here alone”

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!).

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The answer, at least for now, is coming in the form of O Belong, a new album due for release on the 26th April (not coincidentally the second birthday of Fox Food Records). Recorded at home at the start of this year, the release feels very much like a progression for Good Good Blood. You’ll have to wait the whole thing but we are lucky enough to bring you an exclusive stream of the lead single, ‘Soak’.

‘Soak’ sounds like a song which began at the intersection of the first two albums, utilising the lo-fi folk aesthetic of the first release but with more of the experimental tendencies of the second, but quickly went off on a tangent, a new, third direction for Good Good Blood. Layering simple guitar, deep percussion and ambient drones, Smith creates something lush and warm without compromising on his lo-fi ideals, Warren Hildebrand’s production allowing the track a full-bodied feel without smoothing over any of the small details. The result is a genre-straddling gem, hovering between the Bandcamp generation bedroom pop and radio-friendly pop folk.

Lyrically, the song follows Hymnal EP‘s lead, managing to sound at once sweeping and intimate, the vague declarations both sincere and meaningful, like late night promises you’d only dare voice to a single, special person. The trick, I think, is how Smith balances vulnerability and assuredness. By lowering his guard to share personal sentiments of love and hope and faith he grows paradoxically stronger, defenceless by choice, because he no longer wants or needs the insulating, cumbersome weight of protective layers.

“Soak

Your soul in rain

I feel your pain

For what it’s worth.

I hear

You sing a song

Called ‘O Belong’

This ain’t your curse”

O Belong is set for release on the 26th April and you can pre-order it now via the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, including on cassette.

The post Song Premiere: Good Good Blood – Soak appeared first on Various Small Flames.

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.

‘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 alone 

They’ll mourn the son
With his blue
And he’ll be gone
Searching for new”

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

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