To breed or not to breed? That is the question Owen Ashworth appears to be asking with his fifth full-length outing as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, the wryly titled Vs. Children. But this is a Casiotone record, which means Ashworth won't provide direct access to his thoughts, relying instead on proxies, personae, and other distancing mechanisms. That is, until the record's third act, when a new Casiotone seems to emerge. Before that, however, Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date, a further testament to the talents of a man more in tune with the lives of his generation than many of the folks actually living them.
A pair of tracks with unwieldy titles set the scene, the former an account of real-life bicycle-bound bank robber Tom Justice (an apparent one-time acquaintance of Ashworth's), and the latter a similar yarn about life on the lam, this time written in first person. The legend of Bonnie and Clyde looms large over the proceedings-- their names figure into "Tom Justice" and a stylized illustration of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker (heavy with the child she'd never have) graces the record's cover. "What if we'd had the kid?/ I guess it'd be 15," Ashworth muses on "Natural Light", though it could just as well be a line shared between Barrow's and Parker's ghosts during a midnight graveyard tryst. (Foreshadowing ideas that preoccupy Vs. Children's second half.) That Ashworth can shift so readily between storytelling modes speaks to his considerable skill as a songwriter, one for whom allegory and autobiography are but two routes to the same shared truth.
But how, exactly, do we get from bank robbers to baby-making? For Ashworth, it seems that outlaws and unsettled couples are, in a sense, one and the same. Both lead lives that are fundamentally unsustainable, and both, ultimately, are on the run from reality. Yet their carefree exploits are made all the more exhilarating by the tragic inevitability of their surcease. Metaphor and reality at last come into sharp relief on Vs. Children as "Northfield, MN"-- one last outlaw saga that culminates in a car crash-- is masterfully juxtaposed with "Killers". "Oh my God/ What if we had an accident?/ Oh my God," Ashworth begins the latter song in his characteristic mumble. It would seem he's reacting to the previous song's tragedy, until you realize the "accident" in question here isn't a vehicular one. "Till you're dead/ That's how long you're a parent/ Till you're dead," he continues, a sentiment that goes straight for the gut and leaves a baby-sized hollow feeling there.
Along with subsequent tracks "Harsh the Herald Angels Sing" and "White Jetta" (and excepting the backward-looking "You Were Alone"), "Killers" suggests the emergence of a new Casiotone. Plenty of "I"s and "me"s have found their way into past Ashworth compositions-- indeed, the early Casiotone records were full of self-caricaturizing ones-- but none sound so direct and unfettered as those heard on these songs. "Harsh" adopts the perspective of an unwed young woman with child, while "Jetta" climaxes with the dying wish of Ashworth's ill mother: for him to start a family. Both should leave even the most hardened listener a bit choked up. "To stay the same, to never change," Ashworth repeatedly incants on "Jetta". Whether this is the futile plea of all would-be parents or meta-commentary on the Casiotone project's trajectory (like 2003's Etiquette, Vs. Children utilizes live instruments, though it's still unmistakably a "Casiotone record" in every formal way) doesn't matter; like truth and fiction or the personal and the public, changing and staying the same are far from mutually exclusive notions for Owen Ashworth.
