Green Gardens: Greeting/I Am Kind
(Tiny Library Records)
DL/Streaming
Out now
Leeds’s indie folk favourites return, following their second album with their most creative and undeniably moving two tracks so far.
The band’s double single, touched by increasingly leftfield strands of slowcore and musique concrete, shares similarities with their most recent full-length while being even more fragile, lucid, and touching. Both tracks pore over deep desire, but two different kinds conveyed with just as much potency.
Greeting spends its short, galvanising undertow expanding the freak folk of their second album, as the gritty cycles of guitar have their longing varied by the joy in the lissom keys. This joy is met by their characteristic use of weather, portraying how repetitive feelings “distort reality and obscure the reality of just being”. The fitting repetition of rhythm guitar is jolted out of its ruminative state when the bass snaps into the fore. When this happens, an epiphany hits, the sonic and lyrical notes aligning.
This first track is like Big Thief with krautrock’s mantra-like focus on repetition, looking towards the past of folk’s canon while staring intently towards the present emotionally; whereas the second track includes the glacial tenderness of Nick Cave and Low, its iridescent ambient outpouring inducing the feeling that it’s been corralled by strategic genre legend Claire Rousay.
On I Am Kind, the different elements are produced majestically to deconstruct feelings of longing, hope, and loss. Green Gardens, like the aforementioned artists, build their stories as wisely as their melodies. Here, coarse guitars climb the rungs of the track’s desire alongside yawning strings and harmonic melody, leading to a lo-fi sample of speech surrounded by a serene instrumental, its gentle yet stoic pattern meeting the task of living up to the goodness of the figure in the recording. The track captures the essence of bassist and vocalist Jacob Cracknell’s mother – and how her “voice telling me that she’s struggling but the sun is shining. Her voice is like music to me”.
Green Gardens are embarking on a tour in conjunction with the single release – which is available on vinyl through Tiny Library Records – in Hull, London, Edinburgh, and more.
Find copies of the single here.
Follow Green Gardens on Instagram.
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Words by James Kilkenny. Find more of his Louder Than War articles here.
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