The Canadian singer and songwriter’s fourth album is an ambitious collage of ’90s R&B and orchestral dramatics, welded together by her versatile, gossamer voice.
Lydia Ainsworth songs are spectral but aching, like the feeling of being watched in an empty room. Her music is often concerned with monsters and make-believe, setting them against sheets of synth and harmony. And since the glitchy art pop of her 2014 debut, Right From Real, she has blended genres with increasing gusto, indulging in richer, more complex composition and linking her music to a spiritual practice of magic. Her latest album, Sparkles & Debris, is a showcase of this progression, a candy jar of orchestral R&B that asks you to believe, too.
At first pass, Sparkles & Debris feels like a continuation of the synth-assisted R&B from Ainsworth’s 2019 album Phantom Forest, with more groove and less shiver than her first two albums. Songs that start off with one expectation—a silky drum beat out of a ’90s ballad, a celestial synth layered like whipped cream—soon dissolve into something different. “Cosmic Dust” begins with a floaty synth pad and promptly sways into a TLC-type beat. Then, a harp comes in. The collaged nature of these songs can exhilarate, like on “Amaryllis,” where foreboding, gnawing strings give way to a plinky electronic melody. The unexpected elements feed off each other rather than competing, building like papier-mâché.
But although intriguing within themselves, these songs don’t always work alongside each other. The sparse and shadowy Chic cover “Good Times” feels confusing following an art rock song like “Halo of Fire,” and Ainsworth’s more Celtic, voice-led melodies in the second half of the album are a difficult transition from the smooth, rhythmic ’90s pop sound of the first half. Sparkles & Debris is Ainsworth’s most enthusiastically genre-bending album to date, and it’s as occasionally fractured as that distinction would suggest. But Ainsworth’s distinct, gossamer voice welds it together: Regardless of production style, she is always at the front, weaving, tying down airy vocal runs with low whispers, pushing things to feel softer and more rare.
The way the album’s genres and concepts bleed together feels like a watercolor dream. The odd-fruit production makes a perfect home for the lyrics, which tell stories of girls walking to the “fairy place” and crying “liquid fire,” or deploy specifics in the way that a fairytale witch might, like when Ainsworth requests that a blackbird “speak thy name three times.” Like magic, pop songs ask you to harness your ambition, to seek to create a world that’s brighter, more full of love, sex, or in Ainsworth’s case, imagination. Sparkles & Debris is concerned with possibility—everything that shifts and changes and hopes to catch up.
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