Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Etiquette

General Ratings:

Music: 6
Lyrics: 8
Scope: 3
Consistency: 7

RIYL: The Magnetic Fields, The Smiths, The Postal Service

Further Listening: Sambassadeur, Future Bible Heroes, My Little Airport

Place of Origin: Chicago, IL

Instrument/Sounds List: Keyboard/Synthesizer, Drum Machine, Piano, Bass, Drums, Flute.

Mood Tones:

Season: Spring
Weather: Rainy
Time of Day: Evening

Song Highlights: I Love Creedence, Scattered Pearls, Holly Hobby (version)

Favorite Lyrics:

"We Drink too much and fuck too soon/
Smoke cigarettes in rented rooms/
We quit our jobs & shoot the moon/
& cut our wrists & sleep til noon." (from Young Shields)

"We laughed like we were queens/
& split our ballgowns at the seams/
& every single time I'd dream/
It was only El & me/
But then she slipped away from me/
She met a boy from New Jersey/
And they fell fast in love, of course/
I swear it felt like a divorce." (from I Love Creedence)

"Cap & gown, in purple & gold/
You're 22 years old/
& a woman now, you're told./
Aunt Beth & Charlie cut a check/
For their graduating niece,/
& you marked your independence/
With a signature on a lease." (from Cold White Christmas)

Other Thoughts:

This feels like a coming-of-age record to me, not in the sense that the songs describe that awkward time, but rather that Owen Ashworth seems to finally grasp the full range of possibilities that are available to him. Starting strictly as a home recording project (their first album was called Answering Machine Music with good reason), CFTPA has become something grander, if not necessarily bigger. Growth is a concept that gets batted around a lot in music criticism, often to prop up a vague distaste for the new material of a once-cherished band (e.g. "[artist] seems to be just treading water here; the same sounds and themes that made [previous record] seem like a revelation make [new record] feel tired"), but the extra inches here are undeniable and suggest that Ashworth is a record or two away from something classic. The beats and synthesizers that are CFTPA's calling card are still here, to be sure, but there are also a number of acoustic instruments (even a flute) intermeshed in the fabric, and generally higher-quality production values. To understand the impact that this makes, take a second to track down the two versions of the song Roberta C. that are out there (the first is on Twinkle Echo and the second is on the Young Shields EP, the first single from Etiquette). The lyrics and melody are exactly the same, but I wouldn't blame you for not batting an eyelash at the first, whose production sounds light and thin. The second version kills, in part because of the added background strings that come in at just the right time, but also because the cleaner production and surer-footed vocal performance make you really pay attention to the story, which is heart-breaking. It's not fair to call this album a quantum leap, as Casiotone's greatest strengths have always been Ashworth's genius with narrative and keen eye for detail, but it wouldn't be that far off from the truth.

Speaking of the narratives, good lord, they're here. The only album I've reviewed so far that approximately equaled Etiquette for wealth of options in the Lyrics department was Shallow Grave. There's basically a short story collection here, as the scenarios in no less than 7 of these songs are fully realized enough to be source material. My favorite is probably "Scattered Pearls," in which the narrator tries to console her mother over the loss of an heirloom pearl necklace that is broken at a bar by a drunk third party who is trying to pick up the narrator's sister, only 7 of the pearls having been recovered. I think you get the idea. As I mentioned in the Dent May review, Mr. Ashworth ranks close to the top of my list of writers who implicitly understand my particular subset of Generation Y (cf. the quote from Young Shields in the Lyrics section). He certainly doesn't disappoint on Etiquette, and if anything, he's probably getting better, as he seems to have moved from trying to enunciate idiosyncratic emotions to constructing well-defined characters.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the beats, which are strong, if a bit conventional. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he's just using the demo beats that come with his various keyboards, so they're simple, familiar and mostly in 4/4 time. The further into the record you get, the less prevalent they become, and I could understand some of the apprehension that sprouted among the small-but-vocal fan base that he was tracing the same sanitizing arc as Stephin Merritt. Personally, I'm not bothered, as the songs are all top notch, and the beats were never much of a draw for me in the first place. Still, if they were a draw for you before, or you got sucked in by "Nashville Parthenon" or the Lightning Seedsesque fills in "Scattered Pearls," fret not; if the Town Topic EP (the stop-gap movie soundtrack released a few months ago) is any indication, Owen's still got some dancing left in him.

The Downside:

While Mr. Ashworth's voice is unquestionably deep, it's not what I'd call robust, and there are multiple instances where his performance borders on sing-talk (not to Lou Reed levels, but regrettable none the less). The strange blend of club rhythms and introspective confessional is refreshingly off-beat, but also jarring and dissociative at times, so regressive listeners need not apply. The album is a bit front-loaded, and I usually only make it to the end every other listen (the later songs aren't bad, per se, but less instantly appealing, less caffeinated). Also, as is probably deducible from the band's name, there's a strong streak of melancholy that pervades every cranny of this album, so if you're feeling faint of spirit, best to take it in small doses, in brightly lit rooms.