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”

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.

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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 album opens with ‘Under a Northern Wind’, a patient and windswept instrumental track which serves to set the scene and introduce what’s to come. It’s the musical equivalent of the almost Bob Ross-style album art, feeling as rich and grand and organic as the distant mountains and swaying trees. ‘White Gold’ is something of a love song, steeped in an aching melancholy with its atmospheric instrumentation and ratcheting, mechanical percussion. That said, the song isn’t muddied with some morbid self-pity, the sadness present is somehow gilded, sounding like a marriage of Frightened Rabbit and Bon Iver if said couple were to retire to some picturesque wilderness. Smith’s lyrics are important too, the simple poeticism complementing the vibe perfectly.

“Quiet now can hear the rain
It drips and runs
Down blackened slate
Heavy heart won’t feel the same
When I hear them call your name”

‘Come Away the Window’ pairs acoustic guitar with soft breathy vocals, like a dreamier, more pastoral take on folktronica. The percussion on ‘Do You Love Me?’ sounds like someone banging a kick drum in the apartment above yours, forming the almost literal heartbeat of a song strung out on emotion. “Now her hair is growing, she hums a song called ‘O Belong’,” Smith sings, “now the babe is showing and the white fields call me home”. The minimal instrumentation on ‘River Jump’ quivers and plinks behind a field recording of running water, conjuring a sense of meditative seclusion, while, as we said previously, ‘Soak’ sounds at once sweeping and intimate, Smith’s vague declarations both sincere and meaningful, like late night promises you’d only dare voice to a single, special person. If it’s not upbeat then it’s at least redemptive, rising away from struggles rather than falling toward them.

“I can see the light
Shining through
I can see the light
On this hollow night
It’s up to you”

‘The Lend’ floats by with a lazy bob, like the slow bend of a river on a late summer afternoon, before O Belong ends with ‘Wild Ones’, what feels like a distillation of all that has come before. Smith’s vocals are as hazily romantic as ever, the atmospherics warm and cloudy, the percussion understated and constant, little more than a background pulse. The song captures the overall vibe of the album better than any of the others, that bright and honest hope in the face of uncertainty. 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.

You can buy O Belong now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page, including a lovely cassette edition (as always).

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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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