On the night of my 25th birthday, my roommate Angela and I got all dressed
up and went to the Limelight, just the two of us, since we were between
boyfriends at the time. (As it happened, we would marry the next ones,
both of us, but there was no way to know that at the time.) Anyway, we had
barely got inside the door when a stranger turned around and threw up all
over my favorite blue mini-dress. The line for the bathroom was quite
long, and no one could be bothered to let a person with vomit sticking to
them slip in ahead, though several people did turn away in disgust and hold
their noses. We left shortly after, $40 poorer and 20 minutes older and
vowing, at least in my case, to focus on my career and forget about meeting
men for a while.
I tell this story not for sympathy or in a belated attempt to get my $20
back (hah!), but to illustrate something that Owen Ashworth of Casiotone
for the Painfully Alone does far more artfully on his fourth album,
Etiquette. That is that one's mid-20s are easy to romanticize,
especially once you've crossed over to more adult things like mortgage
payments and preschool applications. Still, they're often painful,
uncertain, studded with moments of agony and humiliation... and really only
funny in retrospect.
Ashworth's latest limns the detritus of romantic relationships — trash-blown
morning walks home from pointless dalliances, kisses exchanged in kitchen pantries,
grass-stained sex that may or may not have turned
violent, hours of waiting for phone calls from people who don't bother to
make contact. Like previous albums, this one is full of sharp, sudden
observations, rueful admissions of failure and surprising sweetness. The
lyrics feel very personal, until you realize that more than half of them
are from a girl's perspective, delicately drawn and very perceptive in
their gender-crossing sympathy.
Unlike past efforts, Etiquette is more richly instrumented, drum machine
and
Casiotone supplemented by real instruments and other singers. There's a
wonderful pedal-steel interval in "Nashville Parthenon," for instance, and
the four songs sung by Katy Davidson add a whole other girl-friendly
dimension to the album. Her willfully cheerful delivery of the sad
"Scattered Pearls" is a CD highlight, adding the same lightness and pop
qualities that Claudia Gonson brings to Magnetic Fields.
The album starts with sparse intensity, canned drum thwacks and jingling
tambourine turned mournful under a series of repeated piano notes in "New
Year's Kiss." The song takes us footstep by footstep home, as a young girl
wanders back the morning after a New Year's Eve hook-up. The song is
desolately matter-of-fact but empathetic, acknowledging disillusioned
mornings after in a killer closing line "Not the way that you imagined
it/ On a balcony with champagne lips/ But in a pantry 'gainst the pancake
mix/ You had your New Year's kiss." Denser, more driving, but just as
heartbreaking is "Shields," whose disco-beat and melancholy synths might
remind you of Pet Shop Boys, but whose lyrics evoke the dead-endedness of
20-something existence.
The mid-20s are a period when even friends forever have a tendency to
disappear, into long-term relationships ("Creedence Clearwater") or off to
real jobs in other cities ("Nashville Parthenon"). Ashworth gets the
slacker's anguish exactly right, jealous and mournful and also somehow
superior for having hung on to post-adolescence a little longer than one's
friends.
It's not always clear how much "I" is in these songs, whether they're
snapshots from Ashworth's life or fictional stories about imaginary
characters. What's impressive, though, is how well he gets into the heads
of his female protagonists, real or imagined, in songs like "Scattered
Pearls" and "New Year's Kiss" and, especially, "Love Connection." This
latter song, which closes the album, tells the story of a young girl whose
make-out session on the grass ends in uncertainty and maybe rape ("Some
hours lost/ And at such a cost/ Stains and scars I can't explain.") Here a
young girl caught in a rough-ish sexual situation casually observes that
she'll start watching her weight again — a observation of the links
between body image, sex and self-regard so deft that it's hard believe a
guy came up with it.
There's even a nightclub horror story marginally worse than mine on
Etiquette. In "Scattered Pearls," the string breaks and heirloom
jewelry is strewn onto a disco floor, mostly never to be recovered. "And
as we rode the bus home I thought surely/ I'd wake up tomorrow just to find
that I'd dreamt up everything/ There'd still be pearls on a string/ I
wouldn't smell like smoke/ And I'd still have the cash I spent on drinks," Davidson
sings. And I remember exactly how that girl feels.
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