Album Review: The Green Kingdom - LoveLivesOn
For a guy who is based out of Michigan, Michael Cottone, who
makes glitchy, ambient music under the moniker The Green Kingdom—he seems to
have a penchant for working with labels that do not take American dollars as
form of payment in exchange for his releases.
But I suppose when you are an independent artist making
music that falls into theoretical genres, you will work with whomever is
interested in putting out your record.
The last album Cottone released on a US imprint was 2012’s Incidental Music, on the Baltimore based
imprint Tench. It’s follow up, Dustloops,
arrived on the seemingly now defunct SEM Label (and I recall spending some kind
of amount of Euros to obtain this album in early 2013.)
Cottone’s latest Green Kingdom release, the LoveLivesOn EP, was released on Friday
courtesy of French upstart Disq An, a label specializing in a strong,
similarly-minded graphic aesthetic for its releases—with all artists operating
in an electronic based sound.
Over the course of the EP’s five tracks, LoveLivesOn pushes Cottone’s sound in a
slightly different, less reserved direction. It’s still incredibly restrained,
but along with the very glitchy, skittering electronic accents that run
throughout, a noticeable addition this time around with The Green Kingdom is a
lot of post-rock leaning guitar work—think classic-era Mogwai at their
quietest, right as they are the cusp of exploding into cacophony.
At times, somber and melancholic (like on the opening track “The Surface”) and at times, teetering slightly into sounding menacing, or at least ominous (“The Waking Haze”) Cottone’s guitar work doesn’t so much “breathe new life” into The Green Kingdom as a project, but it does show a different facet to Cottone as a musician. Where the field recorded sounds and low key ambient atmospherics that permeated his earlier albums gave his music kind of a quaint, wandering charm, LoveLivesOn finds the work more focused, and to an extent, more “song oriented.”
There’s always been, like, repeated ideas and themes in
other Green Kingdom pieces—and I mean, let’s just be clear that while sometimes
these can get stuck in your head, they aren’t meant to be catchy or “pop music,”
but there’s a shift towards real structure in this set of five tracks.
The only real throwback to some of Cottone’s early blissed
out, glitchy tendencies is during the titular closing track—and even then, the
faint presence of a rhythm and the feeling that it’s maybe working towards
something bigger by the end (that’s a false alarm though)—keeps it in line with
the rest of the EP.
LoveLivesOn is a
very concise and cohesive set of tunes from Cottone. It’s nothing revelatory,
nor does it need to be. It’s tracks are well crafted enough to evoke atmosphere
and emotion, and sometimes, with ambient and instrumental music, that’s all you
need.
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