To say that Owen Ashworth’s latest album is a collection of moving vignettes would not surprise anyone familiar with his work. For over two decades, Ashworth has been telling stories that, no matter the level of detail, can stir even the sternest heart. Horrible Occurrences, his fourth album under the Advance Base moniker, may as well be taking that statement as a challenge. The tales told within it are the most straightforwardly unspeakable in his catalog, but never buckle under their own emotional weight. Ashworth isn’t here to punish the listener, and his characters don’t exist just to suffer as they might in the hands of a less caring and considerate artist. Thanks to Ashworth’s pleasantly gruff vocal tone and his selection of such beautifully cold instrumentation, he achieves the perfect balance. Listening to these songs is like having a friend hold your hand during a scary movie.
The songs on Horrible Occurrences are tied to each other in their setting, and on some occasions, their cast of characters. Each song takes place in a town called Richmond. Virginians may rest easy; this is not your charming city. Instead, Ashworth’s Richmond is a fictional town full of people plagued by life’s dark moments. People die at the hands of nature and their fellow man. Hope slips through the fingers of anyone who dares reach for it. Richmond, though, is no black hole and there is no supernatural pull towards it; its residents are not necessarily trapped there. People move away, but just like in our real lives, getting away from a bad situation isn’t always quite that simple. At its core, Horrible Occurrences is an album about leaving. It makes no difference whether a character is leaving town, leaving work or leaving to buy a six-pack. Removing oneself from any given place or situation opens up a space and Richmond’s darkness makes haste to fill it.
Ashworth sets the scene with the twinkling opener, “The Year I Lived in Richmond.” Detailing a period when the town was being terrorized by a serial killer, the narrator tells the story of Deborah Lee Hill. Deborah changes her fate one night when the killer breaks in through her window, and she takes him down. After this chilling experience, Deborah leaves Richmond, but her memory reverberates throughout town for ages. As the album goes on and Ashworth tells more stories from these citizens, it’s not hard to see why someone thwarting tragedy and getting out of dodge would feel like something legendary.
Deciding which song is the most evocative may be a matter of personal taste, but for my money, it’s “Big Chris Electric.” A story told with loving detail, Ashworth is accompanied by somber synth pads and keyboards as he sings about Chris, a hard-working electrician who falls in love with Yvonne, a single mother and divorcee. The two begin a loving partnership, eventually conceiving a child and getting engaged. Chris becomes a loving stepfather to Yvonne’s daughter, Laney. But, of course, this story takes place in Richmond. With the same tenor and delivery that Ashworth has been telling us the happy things, he details the night that Yvonne’s ex-husband snaps and kills Chris in a bar fight. As we learn about the aftermath of that night, the lyrics reveal that our narrator is Chris and Yvonne’s son. Though he’s never met him, he’s had to grow up with his father’s memory hanging over everything and it’s made his life miserable. Like many, he can’t wait to leave home: “Someday I’ll fix up his van / I’ll keep his name on the side / I’m gonna get out of Richmond / and vanish into the night.”
Though violence from strangers and not is veined through many of these stories, other, more inchoate misfortunes befall them as well. In “Rene Goodnight,” the titular Rene recounts a chance meeting with a man at her friend’s party. He’s just moved to Richmond from Tulsa, where Rene has friends. A chat with them, though, reveals that the man likely fled Tulsa after developing a reputation for harming his ex-partners. Though he was only ever friendly to Rene, it’s still terrifying. She becomes avoidant, sending him to voicemail and hiding when she sees him. It’s understandable behavior. What kind of person moves to a place where only bad things happen? The stakes are lower but no less devastating in “The Tooth Fairy,” where a man must sneak out of the house to break a 20 so he can leave a dollar for his daughter who’s lost a tooth. Of course, while he’s away buying a six-pack of Miller High Life, she’s woken up and can’t find him. Ashworth sings her cries of “Where did you go, dad?” while a fluttering keyboard crescendos.
It’s often subtle and easy to miss, but characters reappear throughout. In “The Tooth Fairy,” Ashworth’s narrator mentions that his wife Clare is out of town. Later, on “Andrew & Meagan,” we realize that the songs may have the same narrator, as he nods to Meagan’s behavior freaking out Clare. “Andrew & Meagan” also alludes to the track just before it, the eerie “Little Sable Point Lighthouse.” There, Elise and CJ are vacationing in Michigan near the titular lighthouse for Elise’s birthday. One night, CJ goes out to see the lighthouse at night only to never be seen again. His death is never confirmed, but it’s implied that he haunts that place: “Then Meagan asked us if we’d ever seen a ghost / Told us about the night she was driving down the Michigan coast / She passed a lighthouse / And saw a dude standing under it / He looked transparent / She saw the lake right through him / He turned to face her only she couldn’t see a face / It was like the lighthouse lamp was shining in its place.” Was the figure that Meagan saw the ghost of CJ? Part of the fun of an album like Horrible Occurrences is that because Ashworth only gives you so much information, you can tie characters together through any vague loose end, making an already engaging piece of work all the more hands-on.
The lone hopeful moment on Horrible Occurrences, the plinking “How You Got Your Picture on the Wall,” takes place from the perspective of someone who doesn’t live in Richmond. Laney, Yvonne’s daughter from “Big Chris Electric,” got out of town and moved far away. She tells her partner about a time she got caught stealing tampons from Kroger. The manager took her picture and hung it on the wall, alongside similar snapshots. One day, the pair return to move Laney’s brother out of town. While there, the narrator slips into the manager’s office and steals Laney’s picture. It’s a cute gesture from someone who loves her, but it’s also deeper than that. It’s a complete excising of Laney from a place so full of pain, a reclamation of this last lingering piece of her time there. Though the book that is Richmond never really closes, you can at least tear your page out of it.
Eric Bennett is a music critic in Philadelphia with bylines at Pitchfork, Post-Trash and The Alternative. They are also a co-host of Endless Scroll, a weekly podcast covering the intersection of music and internet culture. You can follow them on Twitter @violet_by_hole.
