After 13 years of Lo-Fi drum machines, cheap synthetic sounds and any other conceivably electronic device, “Casiotone for the painfully alone” sings you guys good bye.
Following to seven studio albums, eight EPs and innumerable collaborations with artists such as Karen Mitchell, Amanda Hughes and Cass McCombs, Dan Ashworth, the man behind this meaningful and apparently “spotting-on-sadness” band name, is now ready to stop delving into pocket-sized portraits of discontented twentysomethings and wants to bid farewell of this whole cheap plastic casio, broken hearts, lonesome subway cars and being alone thing.
Generally, it takes roughly 30 minutes to break my heart with real good and ideally pathetic love songs. By the same token it is with the music of Owen Ashworth. On that last ever Europe gig of CFTPA on the 21st of November at Vienna’s Arena it was a little bit different: My heart was already broken far before the concert even started.
Sure, heartache is not hard to swallow when it’s wrapped in soothing alt-country guitars but it’s the Lo-Fi drum machines and sleazy synths that make the lyrics pierce your heart even more violently. And then, when you realize that this is your very last chance to see this bodacious, geek looking man bent over a bargain plastic keyboard drizzling all his desperation and grief into the audience you come to think about the sixty-four-dollar question: shouldn’t we have kissed him when we had the chance?
“Im getting old. I wanna go home and look for my cat.” (Dan Ashworth)
F: Johannes Gierlinger
www.johannesgierlinger.com
T: Rainer-Georg Voggenberger
Rocket Magazine Viena
