CASIOTONE FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone are like watching that moment in City Of Angels when Meg Ryan dies and Nicholas Cage is left alone having given up an eternity for a few measly hours with her. It is like the moment when Anna leaves in The O.C. and Seth is left, tears in his eyes and his nose pressed against the glass of the airport check-in window. It is like those songs that you listen to when you break up with the kind of girl or guy who shape your life and is like when your best friend leaves for another country and you wonder how you ever coped before you met them. Casiotone For The Painfully Alone manage to harness all of that misery and emotion and melancholy and make songs out of it, songs that make your stomach tangle and your throat dry. Live this only happens quicker and more emphatically.
Drawing largely from Etiquette they only really leave out Tonight Was A Disaster from the 'must play' list of songs, but this really doesn't matter. Opening with Cold White Christmas, Owen Ashworth (the man behind CFTPA) has the audience hushed and attentive from the very off. His electro-fused emo couldn't be better suited to his sullen, almost monotone vocals that express his stories of abandonment, false hope and emptiness with aplomb. And so, when Jenny Herbinson joins him on stage to add some female vocals to the mix, it is quite a surprise to find that her innocent, borderline naive, sunshine-like personality manages to add just the right tone to the songs to give them an idea of possibility, but the kind of possibility that would never come true. The highlight of the set for me though was Hobby Holly where Owen sang alone, unaccompanied by any instrument for the vast majority of the song before a small explosion of sound toward the end. Somehow, cutting the clutter and just having the voice, broken and unashamed, singing as though it were only him and Holly in the room managed to make the whole song so much more poignant.
Somewhat coincidentally this show happened to be the very first that I went to alone. It didn't end up being at all painful however. CFTPA are a band that are best suited to having no distractions, nothing to disturb your mind from fixating on the beautiful agony of real life represented without shame or excuses, just a hope that one day a smile will see you through.
http://www.myspace.com/cftpa
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment