Owen Ashworth is familiar with nostalgia. His work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an often lo-fi, not-always-Casiotone-based indie pop project that officially came to an end in 2010, encompassed a range of emotions that often tasted more "bitter" than "sweet." Regret, longing, desire, scorn, and jealousy frequently featured on the menu, but what made those feelings resonate was the presence of memory in his songwriting, the idea that even the most painful experiences are worth remembering. That's why his earliest material was so diaristic, as well as why he once chose to write a song reminiscing on when bridge tolls amounted to no more than "one single crisp clean dollar bill." 2009's final Casiotone album, the anti-procreation treatise Vs. Children, is perhaps his most cynical work to date, but the concluding song "White Jetta" punctuated ruminations on sick mothers and unstable bloodlines with a mantra about staying young forever: "To stay the same/ To never change."
Three years removed, and Owen Ashworth's shell has cracked. A Shut-In's Prayer is the proper debut from his new project, Advance Base, and it's easily the most wistful work he's committed to tape. Couched in the most immediate and affecting melodies of his career, many of the stories told on A Shut-In's Prayer look back at the past mainly to remember its contents. Ashworth's flair for narrative detail is in top form, achieving a level so microscopic that, at one point, he zooms in while ruminating on familial ennui to describe a scene in a horror movie that several characters are watching together. Sometimes, as on the album highlight "Riot Grrrls", these trips down memory lane end with resolution-- or, at least, as much resolution that you could get from two college-age outcasts "Wondering if we ran/ Who'd miss us." Elsewhere, memories take on the form of child runaways and faded filial relationships, as Ashworth is left with disconnected threads between the past and present and not much more.
As a songwriter and, by proxy, as a human being, Ashworth's certainly grown since he started plinking out tape-hiss anti-anthems back in 1998. You can hear his musical progression in the pretty, at-times lush instrumentation on display here, a logical progression from the baroque figures of Vs. Children with added intimacy. He's made leaps and bounds as a singer, too: For all its warm mid-fi glow and quaint arrangements, A Shut-In's Prayer retains its affecting strength thanks to Ashworth's vocal performances. It still feels like a stretch to call him a "singer" by most mainstream standards, but the occasional sullen sneer of his earlier work has been smoothed out.
He's found a nice pocket of resonance in his low-pitched voice, and his higher register is pleasant and sing-songy. Ashworth uses the latter disarmingly on "More Trouble", the album's most easygoing and upbeat tune that, upon closer inspection, is about the grim inevitability of waiting for bad news from a doctor. There are a few songs on A Shut-In's Prayer that deal with such weighty subject matter-- "New Gospel"'s advice to a substance-addled depressive, the troubled sibling relationship detailed in "My Sister's Birthday"-- but the album otherwise largely carries the type of fuzzy sadness that you'd get from looking at old pictures of past (and, possibly, better) times. That such an openly nostalgic album is seeing release on Caldo Verde is a humorous coincidence, given that its founder, Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon mastermind Mark Kozelek, recently waxed nostalgic on "Sunshine in Chicago", a gorgeous cut from SKM's forthcoming album Among the Leaves. If 2012 is the year that downer-music veteran loner types finally start to express some sort of happiness, out of their fondness of the past or otherwise, then so be it.
A Shut-In's Prayer is arguably the strongest album of Owen Ashworth's career thus far, and it arrives at a time when the influence of his former project looms over specific spheres of indie music. The trapped-in-suburbia haze of Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers carries Casiotone's torch of homespun intimacy; Mike Hadreas takes the project's raconteurish flair to new, bruising depths as Perfume Genius; and South Carolina songwriter Mat Cothran's Coma Cinema project possesses the cynicism of Ashworth's youth. As those young artists continue to grow, so does Owen Ashworth, and this new chapter of his 15-year run carries such promise that fixating on the past almost seems pointless, since the future potentially holds so much more in store.
