For a while now, the material on Shy Layers’ debut album has been hiding in plain sight as pay-what-you-wish downloads on Bandcamp. His first EP, featuring six of the album’s songs, came out in January last year; its follow-up, from which three more songs were plucked for the album, appeared this past April. But if an LP release from an obscure German label is what it takes to give the music more exposure, then so be it, because Shy Layers’ eponymous debut turns out to be one of the year’s great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Its almost-August release couldn’t be better timed: This is an album that evokes rumpled linen, Aperol spritz, and balmy Mediterranean breezes, with a bittersweet undercurrent to suggest that autumn is just around the corner.
Growing Bin, the label responsible for releasing the album, is an unusual proposition. It began in 2007 as an MP3 blog for an obsessive collector named Basso to post vinyl rips from his personal collection of rarities—library music, cosmic disco, Polish jazz, German progressive rock, etc. Somewhere along the line, he launched a mail-order operation for secondhand records, and in 2013, he started up the label. By virtue of its founder’s idiosyncratic tastes, the label has carved out a highly specific niche in the overlap between new age, ambient jazz, and lite funk, and if you didn’t know better, you could easily mistake Shy Layers’ debut for one of the vintage, private-press LPs unearthed on Basso’s digging expeditions. It’s a quiet, sometimes cryptic record where purring vocoders veil hushed singing, plucked guitars are wreathed in reverb, and African highlife melodies nimbly snake around echoing drums and arpeggiated synthesizers. It’s hard to say exactly which parts are played and which parts are programmed; it’s not even terribly clear whether there’s a whole band jamming, or just one person laying down overdubs.
In fact, Shy Layers is JD Walsh, a multi-media artist who recently relocated with his family from Brooklyn to Atlanta. Although Shy Layers is the first of his musical projects to achieve any measure of notoriety, he’s been making music forever, and you could guess as much from his deeply intuitive understanding of pop’s mechanics. As understated as a lot of these tunes are, he’s got a keen melodic sensibility that keeps even his simplest chord changes bubbling in your head long after the glossy digital reverb has faded out. While nearly every song floats tranquilly atop a pneumatic bed of synthesizers, the album rarely scans as electronic music, per se. His rhythms combine electronic percussion with acoustic drums cloaked in warm, dry room tone, and guitars frequently take the lead.
Some of the album’s influences are easy to pinpoint. His vocoders sound like kinder, gentler versions of Kraftwerk's robotic choirs, and his bright-eyed melodies share that band’s almost- naïve quality. Highlife and Afropop make their presence felt in lanky electric guitar and mbira-like synthesizers on “Too Far Out,” while “Bees and Bamboos” attempts a kind of ersatz Ethio-jazz with twinned guitar leads and splashes of piano; the chintzy keyboards and dubbed-out saxes of “SEG” have a distinctly Caribbean feel. The dreamy “Holding It Back,” meanwhile, is an obvious Arthur Russell homage, right down to a refrain, “Kissing on the dark side of the moon,” that mingles romance and childlike innocence.
Other aspects of the album’s deeply referential sound are more difficult to put your finger on, even though you know you've heard them somewhere. Plucked guitars, watery synth pads, flanged acoustic strumming, and gated reverb conjure hazy memories of the 1980s: echoes of Tears for Fears, Talking Heads, and Phil Collins swirl together into a home-recorded pastiche of big-money studio polish. And on “Playing the Game,” spindly synths and a high-necked bass melody reminiscent of Joy Division dissolve into giddy falsetto coos, suggesting an alternate universe where goths wear pastel colors. It is the sweetest kind of déjà vu.
As much as Walsh may traffic in the familiar modes and well-worn tropes that have populated chillwave and Balearic retro for over a decade now, Shy Layers really doesn't sound like anything else out there. At times I’m reminded of Sandro Perri’s Impossible Spaces, due to the two musicians’ mutual fondness for Arthur Russell and Steely Dan; Invisible Conga People’s after-hours music for introverts conjures a similar kind of disco hush, while Domenique Dumont’s “L'Esprit de L'Escalier” zeroes in on the same sort of beatific pop. Ultimately, though, Shy Layers’ music flies solo. As the album’s exquisitely melancholy closing song, “1977,” captures so well, the record doubles as a love letter to solitude, offering a different kind of take on yacht rock. It’s not aspirational, and it's not even particularly concerned with leisure. Instead, it’s about standing at the stern of the boat, alone, hands stuffed in pockets, humming a half-remembered melody to yourself as the coastline recedes and the sun dips below the horizon.
