Milk Garden by The Widest Smiling Faces

"I stumbled upon Aviv Cohn’s work about five years ago while digging around the “ambient music” side of some social media platform. Maybe it was because I had recently purchased a loop pedal or something, but I immediately fell in love with the Widest Smiling Faces. The riffs were clean and sparkling. Every song set a mood that was entirely tangible. It was so subtly unlike anything I had ever heard. Every album released thereafter was like falling in love all over again. So here I sit, smitten.

'Milk Garden' is fifteen tracks of gorgeous, colorful guitar work brought to life by Cohn’s quiet whispers. It’s a truly visceral sound. This project has excelled at tiptoeing the lines of melancholy and serenity for years. The ends of that spectrum have stretched even further with 'Milk Garden.' “Be Nothing,” the album’s opener, is a rainy day full of contemplation, slow and steady, grey. The sentiment continues onto “Toothpaste Dreams” and the synth-laden “Warm Blood.”

However, this record is by no means a downer. Tracks like “Flower Song” and “Blue Paper” incorporate bronze strings and swaying tempos. They’re bright and green. It is at this point I would like to assure the reader that I did not consume hallucinogenic drugs while listening to this record despite the frequent references to colors, proceed.

As winter slowly slips into spring, “Wooden Boat” produces a sense of excitement and cautious joy at what is to come. The entirety of Milk Garden invokes a sense of blooming; a slow process that feels better and better as time goes on. The dynamics of the record come from fidelity. Songs skip from clear to murky every other track or so, which probably isn’t a subtle metaphor to the human brain, but it really feels like it. It all comes to an end with “Bird Songs,” a track that summarizes and concludes the previous fourteen moments very carefully. Milk Garden is so wonderfully full of life and feeling, arriving at the perfect time of year."

- Jacob Watkins, Already Dead Tapes, 2018

Tracklist

1.	Be Nothing	4:40

2.	Plaster	3:12

3.	Toothpaste Dreams	1:35

4.	Flower Song	1:57

5.	In a Park	0:33

6.	Warm Blood	2:09

7.	Rain Layers	0:38

8.	Blue Paper	2:26

9.	Chalk Trees	1:10

10.	Wooden Boat	1:21

11.	Seaweed	0:41

12.	My Garden	1:23

13.	Poor Body	2:01

14.	Veins/Arteries	2:33

15.	Bird Songs	2:14

Credits

released March 23, 2018

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