Laura Kerry
Background information about Lydia Ainsworth always resembles an introduction to the keynote address at a conference; you can’t talk about her music without discussing her musical accolades. The daughter of a musician in Toronto, she learned the cello at 10, trained in classical music at McGill, got a master’s in film scoring at NYU, and scored the 2011 film The Woods. Her first album, Right From Real, earned impressive critical attention and a nomination for a Juno award (the Canadian Grammys).
When you listen to Ainsworth’s music, though, all external factors fall away. In her new full-length, Darling of the Afterglow, the artist entices with rich atmospherics and catchy pop. Throughout the album, she sings of different places—a dusty road (“The Road”), “whispers [echoing] from the ceiling” (“Ricochet”), and “the world of the square inch of the heart” (“Nighttime Watching”)—fitting images for music so dense and dreamy that it seems to exist in its own space. Ainsworth often sings with a whisper effect, sounding eerie and disembodied over the pulse of dark electronic bass and the echo of reverb-heavy synths.
Some of the unearthly qualities emerges through Ainsworth’s baroque pop sensibilities. In songs such as “Afterglow,” “Ricochet,” and “WLCM,” the melodies borrow from classical music, even as the underlying compositions use the vocabulary of contemporary synth pop. Resembling Kate Bush or Bat for Lashes, her voice leaps and darts through carefully crafted lines, sounding both beautiful and theatrical. In other places, the instruments follow suit. An orchestra darts in and out in “Nighttime Watching”; a string arpeggio and acoustic bass lead the way through “Spinning”; and a banjo adds texture to “What Is It?” Ainsworth’s music is not only out of this world, but out of time, too.
Despite its spectral tone and baroque touches, though, Ainsworth’s latest LP is also her most straightforwardly poppy. Throughout Darling of the Afterglow, she has planted clear pop earworms that cut through the ethereal haze. Though it has weird touches, the opener, “The Road,” is essentially a piano-driven pop ballad; atmospheric in its verses, “Into the Blue” features a chorus that lodges deep in the mind; and behind the banjo and other detailed and surprising layers, “What Is It?” builds on top of a recognizable piano chord progression. The album even has a cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” but it's stripped down, slow, and vulnerable—unlike both the original and most of Ainsworth’s other tracks. Even when Darling of the Afterglow approaches the familiar, it does so through an ethereal scrim. The resulting pop is uncanny, warm, and beautiful: an afterglow indeed.