mehan jayasuriya

The other night, I sat down to write what should have been a short, fairly straightforward review of a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone show but what came out was a (still relatively short) treatise on why Owen Ashworth is one of the best young songwriters working today. I’ve got a lot of pent-up feelings about Ashworth and apparently haven’t found nearly enough opportunities to write about him (a recently-discovered Word doc full of ideas for a review of Vs. Children that I never wrote bears witness to this fact). I really do think that he’s one of the best things going right now in indie-pop, though and since he’s been perennially underrated, I feel a responsibility to evangelize whenever given the opportunity. So, what makes this guy so great? Well, a lot of things—his melodic sensibilities, his ability to work wonders within a narrow set of aesthetic constraints—but more than anything, his lyrics. He’s got Stuart Murdoch’s knack for writing character studies with real depth, Morrissey’s dark wit and like the authors of some of my favorite short stories (Salinger, Murakami and O’Connor all come to mind), he’s sentimental but doesn’t shy from the ugly stuff. All of this is to say that Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is, in my opinion, wholly deserving of this unapologetically fanboyish rant and if you haven’t checked out his records, you should do yourself a favor by starting with Vs. Children and working backwards. The aforementioned show review and some photos can be found at PopMatters.