The last eighteen months have proved fruitful for James Smith’s Good Good Blood project. Following his self-titled debut, Smith has released a number of EPs and one full album, each of which developed his luscious brand of experimental folk pop coloured with equal parts hope and melancholy. We summed up this aesthetic in our review of Passing Place, a release which took on dark themes in the brightest of ways, “like a ship sinking in reverse… 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”.
His latest EP, Motion | Sickness, is something of a collaborative effort, enlisting the talents of fellow Fox Food alumni Nancy Kells (whose latest album as Spartan Jet-Plex we loved) and Catherine DeGennaro and Suzy Jivotovski (AKA GRNDMS, who put out the excellent Capitol Mill last year). The result is possibly Good Good Blood’s most daring, nuanced release to date, utilising a variety of electronics to create soundscapes around the tracks, worlds in which they take root and grow. ‘Distant | Air’ begins opens with a remote ambient flutter, as delicate and removed as a far-flung snowfield, before opening into a warmer, more acoustic sound complete with Smith’s recognisable vocals. The dichotomy between the two parts is marked, bringing into relief the importance of the vertical bar in the song titles and thus prompting the listener to consider the links and differences between the opposing words and sounds.
A plaintive horn heralds the start of ‘We | Become’, a stretched, even tone which continues as various clicks and drums and vocals enter the fray. As such the track has a dawn quality, the drone rising and warming the earth below into life, before eventually fading out of focus as the song kicks into gentle life. As we’ve come to expect, Smith’s songwriting is a compelling blend of abstract and intimacy, mostly comprising of curt declarations or questions which cut to the heart of some unspoken matter, the wider context reduced to immediate feelings and emotion.
“When I lost my youth
I needed you
when I lost my way
you didn’t stay”
The pattern of difference continues on the epic ‘Dream | Devotion’, with ambience and plucked guitar forming out of silence like the sounds of some unmanned landscape before morphing into a more complete folk song. Again, as with all of Good Good Blood’s music, themes of memory and love and loss haunt the track, internal thoughts cut free from reality and allowed to bloom into beauty.
‘Motion | Sickness’ begins with frenetic strumming which, coupled with wordless voices and near sci-fi synths, forms an almost overwhelming noise worthy of the track’s title. However this passes to a glassy calm, an aftermath which leaves Smith asking a series of questions, be it aloud or within his head, or perhaps his heart and chest:
Will I hold you in my arms?
Will I understand what it is to be loved?
What it is to be had?Can I hold you in my arms for the last time?
Will you cower and die?
Or will you come alive?
Motion | Sickness is out today and you can buy it now from the Fox Food Records Bandcamp page.