Monday, January 30, 2017

#2383 Shy Layers - 2

The Shy Layers must have come to the same conclusion I did - that their sound, while pretty, doesn't really have a lot of breadth, and probably couldn't support an LP / headlining set / career. Their second EP takes tentative steps to expand the sound, but most of them don't work. The cooing actual-human singing and bigger bass break the original sound's ambient spell, and the Paul-Simon-via-Vampire-Weekend rhythm mixups are mostly underwhelming. Elsewhere the tracks go fully-instrumental and reveal how necessary those buzzy near-vocals were to keeping things interesting-enough.

It's not bad - still pretty, still decent background music, but when the best thing about your band is its minimalism, it can be tough to avoid subtraction-by-addition 3/5

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