It’s difficult to parse the myriad influences of Toronto-based composer Lydia Ainsworth. At the time of the release of her Juno-nominated 2014 debut Right From Real, she was as likely to pay tribute to the three-part harmonies of Bulgarian folk singers as she was to the Spice Girls. As if challenging herself to come up with an even more disparate set of touchstones to describe her new LP Darling of the Afterglow, Ainsworth offered up her most mystifying set of references yet, characterizing the album’s lead single “The Road” as “a marriage of Enya and the Weeknd.”
This unholy matrimony is, surprisingly, an apt descriptor for many of the 11 songs on Afterglow. While Right From Real showcased her taste for baroque orchestration with a minimal electronic backbone, they were all a bit too off-kilter to be described as bona fide pop songs; “Malachite” and “White Shadows” were far too mystical and ethereal to draw comparisons to Max Martin’s pop. Although Ainsworth has said that some of the songs on Afterglow were in gestation around the same time that she was writing her debut, she composed others during a brief stint in L.A. while writing pop songs for other artists. Her embrace of more mainstream songwriting is evident even in the first few seconds of opener “The Road,” as dramatic piano chords sustain over dark synths that phase beneath her newly confident voice.
Ainsworth’s more traditional vocal performance is one of the most striking evolutions of her sound. Whether heavily processed on “Hologram” or spliced into sharp daggers on “Moonstone,” Ainsworth’s voice sounded interwoven into Right From Real’s ornate symphonic textures. On Afterglow, she centers her voice to sound more expressive and lucid than ever. On “Ricochet” Ainsworth stretches her voice to its limits, ascending to a soaring falsetto, luxuriating over the softness of her consonants, and in a more familiar vein, pitching it down to harmonize with itself. While this would seem to be an unequivocal step forward, Ainsworth can succumb to melodrama; the twinkling guitar and whispered double-track vocal that composes the first half of “Open Doors” evokes the broad, histrionic effect of a band like Evanescence perhaps more than Ainsworth would like.
While the appeal of Ainsworth’s debut existed in its refined hybrid of orchestral synthpop, here Ainsworth confoundingly falls back on cheesy banjos (“What Is It?”) and crunchy guitars (“I Can Feel It All”) to embellish her already fussy arrangements. The latter song, another one of the album’s high points and one of its more strictly synthpop numbers, seems to reach a climax in the last quarter when she unleashes blaring, rich synthesizers that rumble beneath her coos. The arrangement is already over the top, but Ainsworth’s stadium-ready guitars overload the song entirely.
When the so-called “left-of-center pop” album is executed well, it’s exhilarating (see Ainsworth’s Arbutus labelmate Mozart’s Sister or fellow synthpop seductress Jessy Lanza for recent examples). Ainsworth’s tightened up her songwriting, emoting more profoundly than ever before, but she’s abandoned the more restrained instincts that once made her spectral music so lustrous. She hasn’t yet sorted out the particular combination of influences that fit her strengths, and few of the songs’ melodies are compelling enough to overcome the album’s strangely stale take on alternative pop. Ainsworth is clearly a knowledgeable composer with endless sources of inspiration to work with, but Afterglow proves that finding the perfect formula is sometimes more complicated than one might imagine.
