Bim Tyler, 'Hermit Crab'

(Self-released, digital)

Like many other musicians from the Green Mountains, Vermont native Tyler Griffin started out playing in jam bands. He gigged around the state’s bars and eventually helped found Thetfest, a music festival once held in Thetford.

Griffin didn’t stay in the jam scene long, however, but instead reimagined himself as a folk singer, playing under the moniker Bim Tyler. In 2021, he released his debut effort, Basic Ritual, an intriguing record that saw Griffin show off maturing songwriting chops and multi-instrumentalist prowess. It was essentially a glorified demo, though, a collection of songs that Griffin recorded himself.

We still haven’t seen a fully fleshed-out LP from Griffin, who now lives in Massachusetts, though he says it’s on the way later this year. In the meantime, he released Hermit Crab, a three-song EP full of stark, lyrical imagery, gothic-tinged songwriting and the sense of an emerging talent coming into his prime.

The EP opens with the title track, a song brimming with hazy regrets, as if Griffin were reluctantly reviewing a summer romance from a distance. A light touch of programmed percussion and Griffin’s acoustic guitar form a deceptively upbeat-sounding bedrock from which he moves through a postmortem of past mistakes.

“I’m wondering how it is the decision that I make that keeps me on the line,” he sings. “Between the box and my fantasy, and how I got in the way of me.”

Things take an even more melancholic turn with “Railroad Rat.” Over a gently plucked guitar figure and an insistent mellotron, Griffin lays out a folk masterpiece that’s equal parts Pentangle and fellow Vermont singer-songwriter Henry Jamison.

While he has the hushed delivery and almost tenuous melodies of the latter, a thread in Griffin’s songwriting helps distinguish it from his contemporaries. Yes, he writes with a keen sense of observation, but his details so often suggest secret connections, as if one song were hiding inside another and just waiting to be drawn out: “The peninsula of Florida you have left behind / For the smoky rooms of New Orleans where you now reside / Wearing long sleeves to hide the ink on your wrists / To be another person is just another thing on the list.”

The production on Hermit Crab is a clear step up from Basic Ritual. Mixed and mastered by Adam Selzer (Fleet Foxes, M. Ward) and Sandro Perri (Great Lake Swimmers, Stephen Malkmus), the EP is sonically sumptuous. Whether it’s the gorgeous harmony of the guitar solo on “The Drive” or the ghostly Rhodes piano run at the end of “Railroad Rat,” small, sublime instrumental passages add depth throughout. The result is a record that feels as densely layered and plotted as a novel.

Hermit Crab by Bim Tyler is streaming at bimtyler.bandcamp.com. Catch him on Wednesday, April 26, at Radio Bean in Burlington, along with locals Fern Maddie and Cricket Blue.