Shy Child's previous album Noise Won't Stop hit on a sweet spot between the fashionable and the embarrassing, summed up in the album's surging, synth-heavy new wave sound that brought to mind early 1980s Genesis as much as early-80s Talking Heads. As with both those bands, Noise Won't Stop courted disaster by threatening to "mean it" too much: the songs affected knowing jadedness, while sounding disconcertingly earnest in their communication of disaffection, as if archness and distance are only emotions one feels about other things and other people. The result sounded, at its best, awkward, and loving Shy Child meant loving them because of, rather than in spite of, this awkwardness. Their megaphone enthusiasm seemed noble and necessary, in that you wouldn't engage in it yourself.
On Liquid Love, Shy Child undertake the shift from modernism to post-modernism on just about every level. Gone are the jagged rhythms vaguely suggestive of Timbaland and dancehall, replaced by steady, reassuring disco pulses and lush, squelchy synth work reminiscent of late-era French house (think Alan Braxe and Fred Falke). And whereas before singer Pete Cafarella seemed unable to spot the difference between singing and declaiming, here the vocals are all coy harmonized falsetto croons, a deliberately empty evocation of plastic soul, like a photograph of a photograph. The title track opens with a near-exact recreation of the shimmering intro to Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere", which spells out Shy Child's intentions: not to evoke the "futurism" of the 80s, but rather the utopian agelessness and placelessness of its synthetic textures.
At first I resented this: What value was there in Shy Child abandoning their singularity in order to make songs that sound like less idiosyncratic versions of MGMT's "Electric Feel"? A fair amount, as it turns out, mostly because Shy Child are so good at over-egging their songs with hooks-- the obsessively layered synth work in particular can be dazzling. But whereas before their songs seemed always on the verge of collapsing under the weight of their ideas, here the duo sound reined in, subordinating their maximalist tendencies so as not to spoil the illusion that they are now peddling "perfect" pop.
But Shy Child's brand of arch pop perfection is a front, falsetto vocals notwithstanding. These songs are, if anything, even more earnest than their predecessors, only now Shy Child are trying to seduce you with their insights rather than flatten you with them. "If it feels so right how can anybody call it wrong?" they sigh in "The Beatles", disguising a didactic defense of drug-taking behind rhapsodic sweetness. And despite reveling in four-minute disco-pop excursions, Shy Child haven't switched up their style much as they pretend; the sudden prog rock keyboard solo that floods the otherwise straight-ahead "ESP" evidences the duo's inability to keep their virtuosic tendencies in check, even if now it sounds more like a Daft Punk quote than it would have before. Still, it's a shame that Shy Child don't bust loose more often. The gloriously overblown electronic body music homage "Criss Cross" demonstrates that Shy Child don't need discipline to be engaging, but it's a lonely exception on an album that otherwise sounds rigorously liposculpted.
As with their last album, Shy Child end with an unexpected pinnacle. Then, it was the trance-pop anthem "Cause and Effect"; on Liquid Love, it's bittersweet ballad "Dark Destiny", whose slowly deflating synth pirouettes mirror perfectly the song's depiction of a friendship's persistence through disappointments. "I'll keep defending choices you're making," the duo declares, and if there's a more poignant declaration of fidelity in pop this year, I've yet to hear it. For Shy Child, synth-pop short-circuits the space between unreality and truth, the artificiality of its expanses allowing a sort of wide-eyed honesty that naturalism forecloses. That bittersweet sincerity sticks much harder than Liquid Love's sleek surfaces would ever suggest.
