Lately when I go see my parents, I’ve started joking with my mom that the first thing she does is update me on all the devastating things that have happened to people she knows, knew, or thinks I might have known since the last time I saw her. Kids I sat next to in band class who were killed in motorcycle accidents, brothers of classmates of my mom and my aunt who had heart attacks, the son of a sister of her friend who has been diagnosed with cancer – these people a couple degrees of separation away from us who are experiencing a worst-case scenario. It’s more compassionate than gossipy, and it’s a window into the life my mom has lived outside of being my mom; she remembers members of family trees from her tiny hometown in a way I could only dream of remembering anybody I’ve ever known.
Across his work with Casiotone For The Painfully Alone and Advance Base, most of Owen Ashworth’s best characters inside his best songs are defined by vestiges of their past – things like the desire to tell an ex-friend about hometown gossip because they’re “The Only Other Girl From Back Home,” or the stubbornness to stick out a miserable “Cold White Christmas” alone in a first adult apartment because our main character won’t be the one to put her tail between her legs and call home. Sometimes they’re defined by a resentment toward people who did get out while they sit in their “White Jetta,” stating in no uncertain terms that if you leave you’re as good as dead.
On Horrible Occurrences, Advance Base’s first album since 2018, Ashworth’s protagonists are pushed even further into the forefront thanks to the sparsest arrangements of his career. While minimalistic instrumentation isn’t unexpected from an Owen Ashworth project, there is a noticeable lack of the more lush, sparkling electronics that can be found on previous albums. But little is lost through the subtraction. Instead, the echoing keys and Omnichord flourishes act more like frames for what can be seen as Ashworth’s most ambitious lyrical project to date. The production choices keep his voice firmly at the center of each song until a real contrast is most effective – usually in the form of just enough fuzz to obscure the listeners confidence in the reality presented by the lyrics.
It’s a uniform aesthetic for a collection of songs that, for the first time in Ashworth’s career, live in the same world, constantly intertwining with each other. Richmond – not the one in Virginia or any other number of real life Richmonds – is a town (presumably somewhere in the Midwest based on the Kroger name drop) where, well, only horrible things happen. The album starts with the knowledge that there was a serial killer on the loose for the year that our first narrator lived in Richmond. That serial killer gets killed by a neighbor named Deborah Lee Hill, but the whole saga is so heavily discussed that even the kids know about her stabbing that killer to death. Track two, “The Tooth Fairy,” finds a kid who lost her tooth terrified after being left alone at home briefly by her father who needed to break a $20 to put money under her pillow. I wonder if she knew about Deborah and the serial killer who tried to break into her home. I have to think she did.
Horrible Occurrences is full of these sorts of stories, marked by death and fear and tragedy. Even the things that start positive — a woman finding a man she loves or the pure joy of connecting with a stranger at a party — will be tainted by his murder at the hand of your child’s father out of jealousy (“Big Chris Electric”) or learning that the charming man at the party is known for harming his partners back in his hometown (“Rene Goodnight”). Some boyfriends disappear forever without a trace; some seem like they might have disappeared going out for more beer; some get stuck in the snow and you don’t know what happens in the end. It leaves some characters desperate to leave while they watch the people around them stuck in place by the ghosts of their own tragedy. The only positive ends are for people who get out for good, sometimes with the help of a partner removing their teenage shoplifting mugshot from the wall of a grocery store’s back office (“How You Got Your Picture Off The Wall”).
The album ends with our final narrator coming back to Richmond – I imagine it’s a character we met before who finally did get to drive away in Chris’ van, who didn’t actually end up jumping off that roof to paralysis. Or maybe it’s someone new. The goal of coming back is to show someone how much they’ve grown and talk about all the tragedy and all the pain in the rearview mirror and to make amends. It’s a return home to reconnect with a mother, I presume, but it’s more than that. It’s knowing that you can’t become you without the circumstances you came from.
The characters on Ashworth’s new album are no different than many of his other characters. After all, his power as a songwriter has always been in the simple realism of the worlds he creates and the people who inhabit all of them. Everybody is tethered to tragedy and pain and complicated memories of the past – these are characters who feel as real as any of the people in my mom’s stories, who remind me of the depth to which everybody is connected and how lives continue even when you can’t see them. It’s just that, in Richmond, the only thing to do is to leave or kill the thing that’s going to kill you, lest you find yourself on the other side of the knife or the gun or the impenetrable white screen of snow.
Horrible Occurrences is out 12/6 via Run For Cover.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Chvrches frontwoman Lauren Mayberry’s solo debut Vicious Creature
• Blackpink member ROSÉ’s solo debut rosie
• Goose frontman Cameron Winter’s solo debut Heavy Metal
• Angel Olsen’s Cosmic Waves Volume 1
• TV Girl & George Clanton’s FAUXLLENNIUM
• Ross From Friends alias Bubble Love’s self-titled debut
• White Denim’s 12
• Gleemer’s End Of The Nail
• Fennesz’s Mosaic
• Roddy Ricch’s The Navy Album
• Rich Amiri’s War Ready
• felicita’s Spælarkle
• TWICE’s Strategy mini album
• Stephen Schwartz & John Powell’s Wicked: The Original Motion Picture Score
• Shoko Igarashi’s Onsen Music
• Alice Hebborn’s Saisons
• Six Missing’s Gentle Breath
• Until I Wake’s Renovate
• Yanling’s Cymatic
• Low Harness’ Salvo
• Golin’s sensor
• Seahawks’ Time Enough For Love
• Concrete Husband’s Piel
• Out Of/Into’s Motion I
• Lucy’s Cooper B. Handy’s Album, Vol. 9
• Bobby Halvorson’s I’m Already Gone
• Hepcat’s Scientist Meets Hepcat: Scientific Dub Special
• Lucinda Williams’ Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road
• The Rolling Stones’ Welcome To Shepherd’s Bush live album
• Interpol’s Live At Third Man Records
• The box set Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024
• Laura Nyro’s Hear My Song: The Collection, 1966 – 1995
• Blue Note All Star Collective’s Motion I
• Dua Lipa’s Live From The Royal Albert Hall
• Throbbing Gristle’s TG BERLIN box set
• JOHN (TIMESTWO)’s POST-KINO (Live At Scala)
• Tori Amos’ Diving Deep Live
• Nils Frahm’s PARIS live album
• Robbie Basho’s Snow Beneath The Belly Of A White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings
• Reuben’s The Complete Stakeout Sessions
• Local Natives’ Time Will Wait For No One But I’ll Wait For You deluxe
• Kassie Krut’s Kassie Krut EP
• Shabaka’s Possession EP
• UCHE YARA’s honey EP
• Oliver Hazard’s Raindrop River EP
• M. Byrd’s In Breech EP
• Lightman & Lightman’s Sister Smile EP
• Picturesque’s I Hope You Hate It EP
• Blawan’s BouQ EP
• FJAAK’s REMIX01 EP
• Celebration Summer’s A Little Less Numb EP
• Ciao Malz’s Safe Then Sorry EP
• Red Sun & Bonus’ Unnecessary Riffness split EP
