Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
Etiquette
[Tomlab; 2006]
Rating: 7.7
Your mid-twenties can be tough. Casiotone-man Owen Ashworth sounds like he's trying to provide a soundtrack to that sentiment. The tired plonking of big fingers on little keyboards, the resigned lo-fi mumbling, the slacker-bedroom tale telling-- they're tired, morose, frustrated, sick of waiting. You'd think the schtick would get old, but it hasn't; it may be too primal, too basic. Every one of us, after all, has written "songs" like these, even if they're as simple as tapping a rolled-up waiting-room magazine on your leg and grumbling, "My appointment was for two o'clock/ Why is my dentist such a cock?" They're the songs you sing to yourself when you have problems too banal to expect anyone else to care about-- which is the college grad's mid-twenties in a nutshell. I've seen Ashworth perform twice, once in a big venue and once in a dorm lobby; the first seemed awkward, the second natural. He's big, sloppy, dry in his humor: It seemed like some freshman shut-in had dragged his gear into the hallway to bother everyone.
The brief (30-minute) Etiquette is a step forward for him, musically-- it complicates things, cleans them up, brings in contributions from his friends, and even conjures up some Postal Service sheen. But the crux of it is still the storytelling. A lot of Ashworth's songs are two minutes and two verses long: Act One and Act Two of some tale or other about middle-class 20-something kids doing cruddy everyday middle-class 20-something stuff. It's to his credit that he's not looking to romanticize that stuff. Most of his time is spent doing the opposite: cutting back to the plainness of reality, the lack of romance. "New Year's Kiss" starts with someone trudging home hung over, which is exactly how Ashworth and even his drum machine sound. An afternoon spent reconstructing the night reveals a kiss more boring than hoped-- not "on a balcony with champagne lips/ But in a pantry against some pancake mix." The song ends without further comment.
"I Love Creedence" is even more banal and even more affecting. Childhood friends move to Philadelphia to live on family money. One meets a guy and moves out. The lonely remaining kid gets a job like everyone else. If not quite indie-scene haiku, there's at least the smell of Carver and Fred Barthelme and "K-Mart Realism" here-- the everyday snapshot and the relentless leaving-it-at-that, the implication (but never the evidence) that it all really matters, man. Why it seems to matter: because something just as normal happened to you, and it certainly felt important, even if you were no closer than Ashworth to figuring out what it meant. "What it meant" is the third verse, the one Casiotone songs omit.
All of which is pretty typical indie-- this desire to talk just like everyone else around you, and make music like you don't necessarily know any more about your instrument than they do. There's some of that latter impulse still present, in the way the one-note trudge of "New Year's Kiss" is lifted from Pavement's "Here", or the way the next track sounds like bedroom synth-poppers Vitesse, who sound like one-time bedroom synth-poppers Magnetic Fields. In other words, this isn't invention; it's a style. The style says rickety bedroom Casio is as "real" as it gets, even if it's second-general passed-down real, every bit as stylized as hip-hop's occasional crack-era nostalgia. (Of course, the crack era's waned, whereas the world of bored, lonely college grads holds steady.) More credit to Ashworth, then, for stretching his musical wings here. Around the usual minimal plonks and the usual overdriven fuzz-bombs, there are live instruments, guest vocalists, and songs like "Nashville Parthenon"-- the track is detailed and modern like a Figurine number, and a thrill when pedal steel comes cruising in unexpectedly.
The improvements raise questions, though. Ashworth has set himself up to talk to people who are (presumably) just like him-- describing love and friendship as played out in crappy apartments, both for the people who live in them and the college kids soon to join. But is that it? Can he talk to anyone else? Couldn't he make something even less rickety, something pitch-perfect enough to tell those stories more widely-- just as Morrissey, one of his models, once did? For now, he sounds in between: Etiquette gives up the homemade purity of Casiotone's first few records, but it hasn't entirely gotten where it's going, either.
-Nitsuh Abebe, March 13, 2006
Review by James Christopher Monger
Etiquette, literate plastic keyboard maestro Owen Ashworth's fourth release under the moniker Casiotone for the Painfully Alone introduced non-bedroom production into the mix, utilizing guest vocalists, strings, woodwinds, pedal steel guitars, and various synthesizers and drum machines from other companies into what was once a simple recipe. What sounds like a major overhaul on the album jacket is less so when applied to the 12 tracks that fill Etiquette's exoskeleton with meat. Fans who swooned over Ashworth's previous collections of snide, affecting, and consistently heartbroken pop songs will find that he's only taken the first step up from lo-fi, with at least half of the songs still residing in the thin, insular confines of four-track distortion filtered through corner store six-packs. That's not to say that songs like "I Love Creedence," "Cold White Christmas," and the Steve Merritt-channeling-David Bowie's-"Five Years'" grandeur of "New Year's Kiss" don't resonate on a sonic level as well as an emotional one. In fact, those three, along with the jazzy "Bobby Malone Moves Home" and the hesitant "Nashville Parthenon" may be some of his finest works, but the inclusion of guest vocalists Sam Mickens, Jenn Herbinson, and Katy Davidson -- the latter leads four songs -- all of whom have lovely and expressive voices, keeps Etiquette from engaging on the kind of one-on-one basis that made Pocket Symphonies for Lonely Subway Cars and Twinkle Echo such selfish pleasures.
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