With a proper release of new songs due in less than a month, you might wonder why Owen Ashworth, the man behind Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, feels the need to release this collection of singles and rarities now. The reason seems to be threefold. The clearest reason is necessity: The 15 songs on Advance Base Battery Life are culled from three years of contributions to split 7"s and compilation albums-- all but two are on CD for the first time here. Also, the compilation shows off the sheer size of Ashworth's output. From 2004 through 2007 (the period that Battery Life covers), he released two full-lengths, but he also released almost as many songs outside of those albums as on them. Anyone who has complained that the three-year absence between CFTPA albums was too long will now bite their tongues, considering that this collection proves just how busy Ashworth has been. And finally, with the forthcoming Vs. Children adding new instruments and mostly avoiding the lo-fi keyboards from which the band takes its name, it seems like Battery Life is a last hurrah of sorts, a good reminder of how Ashworth has made so much out of so little for so long.
Though the expected tracks of washed-out vocals, shimmery keyboards, lonely drum machine thumps, and efficiently told tales of romantic disappointment abound, there are also surprises here. "The Only Way to Cry" is a 46-second blip of bedroom-recorded, droning keyboards that would play as novelty if its sentiment wasn't so strangely moving. Succinct like a musical haiku, its tells its story in only five lines, but its economy of language makes the tale of a man who buys out a movie theater just so he can have a good cry alone even more affecting. And "Holly Hobby" flips the script on Ashworth's usual "why isn't she with me" storyline, indulging in his inner manly heartlessness with a blunt monologue to a girl whom he's treated the way he's always complaining that he is: discarded and unappreciated. "I'm sorry that you fell/ But you should have known just as well/ That you're just a hobby, Holly," he sings against a disarmingly sweet synthesizer melody.
The covers that backload the album-- Missy Elliott's "Hot Boyz", Paul Simon's "Graceland", and Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" and "Born in the U.S.A."-- act as added evidence for Ashworth's style, proving that even the biggest hits of the uber-masculine Boss can sound fragile and vulnerable when buried in layers of distortion and stripped of all studio gloss. The Missy cover is especially ingenious, keeping the rhythmic heaviness and playful skittering drum line of the original, but adding the slightly bored, girlish vocals of Dear Nora's Katy Davidson to undercut all the lyrical consumer-porn.
That said, Advance Base Battery Life is not likely to earn Ashworth many new fans. If you already have little patience for his mumbled delivery, devastatingly astute observations of the banalities of slacker life, and amateur production technique (or lack thereof), then you won't be swayed by these buzzing, muffled tracks. But those who already like his sorrowful whispers will find these intimate odes to ennui stirring and sad. The good news for the haters, however, is that, with the impending arrival of the more floridly arranged Vs. Children, this album might be the last bow for Ashworth's Casiotone, which, it seems, may no longer be so painfully alone after all.
