Lydia Ainsworth, ROY, and Mike Trask
Lydia Ainsworth
Sparkles & Debris // Zombie Cat
As a Canadian artist, there are a number of reasons to envy the career of Toronto’s Lydia Ainsworth. From being born into a musical family to being nominated for a JUNO for her 2014 album Right from Real to having a song featured on the most recent season of Stranger Things, she has enjoyed a lifetime of success stories and winning the hearts of critics. Now in a period when most artists have scaled back production on present and future releases out of necessity, the normally solitary Ainsworth has ironically released her most collaborative album to date, a product of years’ worth of working with studio musicians, producers and engineers in studios in Toronto and both coasts of the United States. That album is Sparkles & Debris.
As one would expect from an electronic release, there is a fair bit of variety in the styles and sounds found from track to track. Compositionally, the only common elements each song truly has are sudden beginnings and endings, frequently appearing vocal harmonies, and distinctive embellishments in Ainsworth’s vocals. Adding to the variety of sounds is the appearance of electric guitar and acoustic instruments including strings and live drums. This added palette takes an extreme in the psychedelic “Forever”, in which electronic sounds are mostly effects and otherwise virtually nonexistent. Throughout most of the music, however, much of Ainsworth’s focus is geared toward synth pads, with which she creates an ethereal soundscape. With lyrics often describing love and longing through a filter of cosmic fantasy, this marriage of music, vocal style and words creates an atmosphere with the encompassing nature of an elaborate dream.
As one would expect from anyone who has worked as an artist as long as Ainsworth (especially one with a Master’s Degree in composition), she appears to pull elements from multiple sources. While many of her choices in synth tones and production are reminiscent of the 1980s, most noticeably in the Tears for Fears-esque “Queen of Darkness” and the closing track “All I Am” that would sound straight out of M83’s DSVII if not for the vocals, she also takes elements that can be found in as wide a spectrum as Renaissance choral music (also in “All I Am”) and 2000s R ‘n’ B (“Cosmic Dust” is a prime example).
Combining her familiar and spacious electronic art-pop aesthetic and mythology-evoking songwriting with the added sonic possibilities that non-electronic instruments bring, Sparkles & Debris is a welcome addition to Lydia Ainsworth’s discography.
- Ty Vanden Dool
ROY
Roy’s Garage // Idée Fixe
This record is the fucking jam. Straight-ahead psychedelic garage rock in the style of all those legendary West Coast 60’s bands that you loved from the Nuggets compilation, all done with a painstaking eye towards detail and authenticity. Tons of introspective heady navel gazing accompanied by all the accoutrements of vintage psychedelica, drenched in reverb and swirling organs, and dusted with a fine layer of fuzz. True facts, as a dedicated fan of 60’s West Coast psychedelia, if you threw this on and told me it was an undiscovered LP recorded in ‘67 I probably wouldn’t challenge you on it.
An issue that I often have with a lot of modern psych acts is that they typically gravitate to a single element of the genre and really milk it for all that it’s worth, often neglecting the nuance and songcraft that typifies a lot of the acts that they parrot. This isn’t the case with ROY. While there may not be any massive new ground broken here, were this album to have actually come out during the late 60’s psych explosion, Roy’s Garage would have likely been a critical contender alongside similar offerings by The Electric Prunes, The West Coast Experimental Pop Art Band, The 13th Floor Elevators et al.
Beyond these elements, there’s some really great playing on the record. “Where the Mind Meets the Eye” contains fantastic acoustic rhythm accompanied by an entrancingly hypnotic bass line, and manages to create a real sense of depth in motion with nary a touch of percussion, and buoyed by precise, etheric harmony singing and a virtuosic bit of lead guitar. Over the course of 7 sprawling minutes it managed to keep me totally engaged, and never felt self-indulgent. There aren’t too many clues as to the musicians on the album, but I’m assuming the sole player and producer here to be Patrick Lefler, the Toronto musician behind ROY. If that’s the case, I’m doubly impressed. There’s a real sense of musical cohesion, and an auteur’s gaze with regards to production value and arrangement.
At the risk of sounding gauche, I’ll likely be re-visiting this LP at some point under an enhanced mental situation - it’s the kind of record that certainly warrants listening in an altered state, headphones cupped snugly on my head, and even just kicking back on my couch with it I felt I could taste the swirling colors with my mind.
- Shaun Lee
Mike Trask
TV Dinner // Self Released
From the village of Memramcook, New Brunswick resides the versatile Mike Trask, a musician who takes inspiration from country, folk, and blues, and weaves it with a synth-pop, psychedelic rock sound to breakdown the conformity of a single genre and experiment with a variety of musical directions. TV Dinner is the tenth studio album from Trask, released under his own recording company, Memramcook Recording Company (MRC). The eleven track album is a flawless execution of my oft-mentioned genre salad. This is apparent even through the albums cover, a 1970’s aesthetic with lo-fi undertones.
“Bad News” is a classic blues rock track, with Trask’s raspy, distorted voice, an overdriven guitar, and a groovy bass line. It’s a hard, in-your-face track that melts the heart of a blues fan such as me. Likewise, “Yellow Sky”, the albums opening track, takes a more contemporary blues sound while mixing in a lush synth and a much laxer vocal delivery. On the other side we have “The Painter”, a song that borders on the new wave with its eccentric vocals and abundance of synthesizers, and “My My, Bye Bye” wherein Trask adopts a Bob Dylan impression and accentuates it with an upbeat country instrumental. I never knew what to expect with the next song and found myself looking forward to what surprises Trask had in store.
Mike Trask doesn’t just manage his versatility, he thrives off it. He uses an ever changing vocal style and experimentation to create a masterpiece and one of my favourite albums of the year. It’s a pleasant treat for the appreciators of lo-fi and folk while still streamlining it to give each song enough pop to make it easily digestible. TV Dinner shows that the biggest ideas can come from the smallest of places, in this case a village just off the East Coast. This is a great album to celebrate the start of the summer, and as the air warms and the shorts come on, I know I’ll find myself returning to Trask and his wonderful work.
- Brandon Kruze
