Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Advance Base Battery Life (Album)
This is a good album to garden to, or maybe do some dusting, or maybe just hang around your house with a cigarette hanging from your lips swirling your arms around you like you're a squid. In other words, it's pretty rad.
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone often makes me feel like I'm lamenting a lost time in my life, when love was tumultuous and I was in a cool band, like I'm lamenting my distant youth, and then I remember that I'm only twenty-three, youth not lost. But I still really like listening to these songs.
In business terms, Wikipedia or someone else's review told me that this is a disc of unreleased tracks and covers. No-one does enough Bruce Sprinsteen covers nowadays, so I'm really glad that Owen Ashworth (the man behind Casiotone) has stepped up. Born in the USA is a really great electro fuzz version of the sing-a-long classic, but is absolutely blown away by Streets of Philadelphia. Ashworth has taken a song already emotionally broken and beaten, and taken it to an impossibly melancholic place. The song is beautiful and broken, and easily one of the best tracks on this release. It deserves to be on repeat for entire evenings, as it has been at my house.
Other covers include Paul Simon's Graceland and Missy Ellliot's Hot Boyz which thrills with its humour and beat. Appearance by guest vocalist also spice up the Casiotone formula which some find a tad repetitive after a few listens. Standout tracks include Old Panda Days which promises to be a radio hit with its infectious beats and pretty vocals, and the acoustic simplicity of It's a Crime.
This isn't a release full of hits, but its good, and reasonably consistent and very listen-able. Get it just for Streets of Philadelphia so we can all cry ourselves to sleep at night thinking about how the love of our life left us emotionally stranded and numb, with no money in a cold and lonely city. (Yes it's a sad song, but it is AMAZING, listen to it, on repeat!)
