POCKET SYMPHONIES FOR LONESOME SUBWAY CARS
Tomlab #16 CD/LP released 2001
01 we have mice
02 tonight was a disaster
03 suitcase in hand
04 caltrain song
05 dying batteries
06 oh, contessa
07 bus song
08 yr boyfriend
09 casiotone for the painfully alone in a green cotton sweater
10 number ten
11 destroy the evidence
12 lesley gore on the tami show
13 oh, illinois!
14 the subway home
15 airport samba
16 we have mice (boombox version)NOTES
songs made up sung & played by Owen Ashworth with:
Jason Quever drums on 1 & 4, cello on 4 & 12
Cass McCombs drums on 12
Charity Coleman singing on 16
these songs were recorded between 1998 & 2001in various
Californian bedrooms with the invaluable assistance of
R K Williams, Jason Quever, Sikwaya Condon & Michael Eberhard
mixed & assembled w/ Sikwaya Condon at his house in Oakland 2001
On the instrument respect scale, Casio keyboards have got to be pretty darn close to the bottom– somewhere around guitars with built-in amplifiers and ukuleles. Nevertheless, they score remarkably high in the sentimental value category. The first synthesizer budget-priced enough to serve as Christmas tree fodder for late-80s twelve and thirteen year-olds, the Casio has provided many of us with fond memories of one-finger jam sessions to a brisk rhumba preset, trying to decide whether the so-called ‘violin’ or ‘trumpet’ setting was a more appropriate voicing. My own model was the beautiful PT-87, complete with ROM disk port that allowed me to play along with hits of the day like "Dancing in the Dark" and "Walk of Life."
Still, like Casio’s drinking buddy Atari, there’s a certain amount of kitsch value attached to the instrument that prevents one from taking it too seriously. Which is why the idea of a mostly-Casio album that purports to consist of melancholy compositions for lonely souls is a little cognitively dissonant, like a collection of funeral marches performed on Rapman and Drum Buddy. So throughout Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’s second LP, a listener’s not quite sure whether to giggle, reminisce about soft-focus juvenile keyboard experiences, or mope along with CFTPA solitaire-junkie Owen Ashworth.
Fortunately, when recorded right (read: poorly), Ashworth’s digital friend is no less effective a tool for found-art, spontaneous-style tuning as the acoustic guitar most one-man acts choose. The obvious com-parallel-ison here would be Mountain Goat John Darnielle, who has been known to include the occasional Casio throwdown on his own albums, and whose minimal, hiss-laden approach to production Ashworth apes here. Actually, he emulates more than just Darnielle’s recording style: Ashworth also borrows the fragmentary song structure (the 3:43 "Destroy the Evidence" is a downright epic), occasional spoken-wordish delivery, and even has a geographically oriented breakup song titled "Oh, Illinois!"
But where Darnielle’s keyboard jams never quite match up with the monophonic vibrancy of his primary instrument, Ashworth shows a knack for augmenting his flimsy instrument with his meager means. Copious amounts of fuzz grant the keyboard’s rudimentary, built-in drumbeats significantly more texture ("Oh, Contessa!," "Yr Boyfriend") and the old over-distortion technique allows him to squeeze some impressively noisy waves out of the little guy ("Bus Song"). Occasionally, when songs go on longer than fifty seconds, these elements allow for a surprisingly full sound that could almost pass for New Order streaming at 28.8 kbps, with just about as much melodic appeal. I’m thinking "We Have Mice" and "Suitcase in Hand" for you MP3-sampling types.
And yet, it remains tough to overlook the central gimmick of the album, and despite the rather valiant efforts of Ashworth, the Casio shows its limitations in setting a somber tone. Little touches like the push-button tempo shift of "The Subway Home" or the hyper-minimalist song-frag "Dying Batteries" may be cute, but they counteract the album’s thesis that the instrument is not mere junk-store novelty. You gotta doff your cap to Ashworth, though, as Pocket Symphonies for Lonesome Subway Cars turns out to contain a few yards more depth than I would ever have imagined my childhood keyboard could provide. Only now do I feel stunted for never progressing beyond those ROM-accompanied versions of "Greensleeves."
— Rob Mitchum, July 23, 2002