Casiotone For ThePainfully Alone -Etiquette

Mon 31st Jul, 2006 in Music Reviews

As Cameron Crowe, the genius writer-director of Almost Famous and Say Anything, once said, the best characters are always the battered idealists. The eternal optimist struggling to maintain their spirit against a cruel and indifferent world. It’s Holden Caulfield drifting through the streets of New York, Pip still pining for Stella at the end of Great Expectations despite everything and Lloyd Dobler standing on Diane Court’s front lawn with a boombox playing Peter Gabriel.

On Etiquette, the fourth album for Californian one-man band Owen Ashcroft, the idealists really take a battering. There’s the girl in ‘New Year’s Kiss’ whose dreams of holiday romance are cruelly dashed; instead of an embrace “on a balcony with champagne lips” she has to settle for an encounter “in a pantry against the pancake mix”. On ‘Cold White Christmas’, it’s a college girl living away from home, her dreams of independence and adventure cruelly dashed as she finds herself broke, bored and, yes, painfully alone. Then in ‘I Love Creedence’, he sings of a girl whose dreams of enduring friendship are, wait for it, cruelly dashed, when her friend gets married and leaves her alone with her dull job “typing letters for a lawyer in a bad toupee”.

While he is lyrically attracted to the same kind of characters, there is nothing predictable about a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone album. His subject matter is actually unusual in a way, as he tackles everyday disappointment. Perhaps only Eels or power-posters Fountains of Wayne, on songs like ‘Sick Day’ and ‘Hey Julie’, can transform subject matter most bands would reject as not grand enough into such sublime, heartbreaking pop. Like the Fountains, Ashcroft’s songs always work as self-contained stories and are rich in cinematic detail, not surprising given he dropped out of film school, frustrated with the cost of getting a project up. On ‘New Year’s Kiss’ for example, the scene of the protagonist’s lonely walk home is set with broken windows and empty phone booths.

In terms of the musical backdrop, it’s also interesting, by far and away the most expansive and varied Casiotone record, a comparable progression to Elliott Smith’s move from the lo-fi “Either/Or” to a lusher, more textured sound on “XO”. Still, “Don’t They Have Payphones wherever you were last night?” is about as spare as it gets, just a few plaintive keys and a barely-there drum beat accompanying Ashcroft’s lyrics of disappointment. “Young Shields”, meanwhile, comes across as an anti-anthem for the prozac generation with its bleakly incisive lyrics: “we drink too much and fuck too soon/smoke cigarettes in rented rooms…cut our wrists and sleep to noon”.

As a chronicler of modern romance gone wrong (“Woke up with your fingers crossed/In a boy’s bed with your pants off”), Ashcroft could be considered a contemporary of Bright Eyes while his lyrics sometimes approach the cleverness of Magnetic Fields mastermind Stephen Merritt. Yet it is never merely cleverness for its own sake, but instead deft character development as in ‘Cold White Christmas’: “Your second shift as a fry cook, that’s your holiday in grease”.

While Ashcroft still can’t really sing, his world-weary rasp fits these downbeat tales like a favourite old cardigan. This is emo music in the truest sense of the word: emotional music, though without the relentless narcissism that can mire that genre. Perhaps there is nothing here as nakedly emotional as ‘Secretest Crush’ from his first record or as perfect as his cover of Prince’s ‘When You Were Mine’ (available as the b-side to ‘Young Shields’) but ‘Etiquette’ stands as his best overall album and establishes Ashcroft as indie-pop’s patron saint of the lonely.