“Love is loyalty,” Marilynne Robinson writes in an essay on the decline of family and human connection in her collection The Death of Adam. Taking aim at the neoliberal organisation of society, Robinson laments how the very features that allow people to unite and help one another, “the qualities of patience and respect and loyalty and generosity,” are not only devalued but sometimes even held as weaknesses, signs of dependency or timidity displayed by only the meekest of suckers. Faced with this, she argues, “the real issue [of society] is, will people shelter and nourish and humanise one another?”
From the early days of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone right through to the current moniker Advance Base, the songwriting of Owen Ashworth has always had a humanising quality. Providing glances into the lives of an array of characters, Ashworth produces vignettes of moments of loneliness, vulnerability and grief, or else the slow aftermath where the world’s continued spin does little to shake the feeling. And, while heartbreak and separation are key themes in these stories, Ashworth far from limits himself to the genre favourites of death and divorce. There has been bank robbers, unlucky swimmers, adolescent satanists turned killers—a cast of characters united by a common, human tendency for suffering.
The use of short glimpses into the worlds of fictional characters plays a fundamental role in Ashworth’s style, serving to free the songs from excessive introspection and self-pity. Which is to say, he does not deal in the woe-is-me solipsism of teen mope movies, or indeed that of middle-aged marriage trouble so familiar from quote-unquote ‘high’ literature. Ashworth provides us with people living through pain and loss, not obsessively analysing and attributing it to their own character. And through this, he opens up a space for the very features Robinson fears devalued and lost.
Ashworth is back with a brand new Advance Base record, Animal Companionship, out via Run For Cover and Orindal Records. Though not a concept album, pets (especially of the canine variety) are a recurring motif, and the idea proves fundamentally relevant to his continued examination of the human condition. If love is loyalty, the record asks, then how better to portray it than through the relationship a person shares with their dog?
Opener ‘True Love Death Dream’ is typically rich and narrative-driven, telling the story of the death of a teenage crush over slow and lush keyboard and drum machine. As with much of Ashworth’s work as Advance Base, the story is told from the distant future of middle age, the narrator naming her dog after the long-gone (but certainly not forgotten) boyfriend. It’s a song about intense emotions of love and hurt, set not in their burning midst but from a temporal distance, a wash of blue-grey melancholy punctuated with little jabs of glimmering golden hope. “It was true love,” Ashworth sings, “don’t let them tell you any different,” the sense of heart-strong defiance a reminder that even memories tinged with tragedy can be a solace.
‘Dolores & Kimberly’ follows with another richly imagined story, the narrator leaving behind a life and family for someone in a new city. The most memorable scene comes in the final third, when our narrator gets a divorce, a full two years after moving away, and celebrates by listening to ‘Moon River’ with their new love in an empty bar. “That night after closing,” Ashworth sings, “we opened up some good champagne and we slow danced across the floor.” It’s a story that could have been made seedy or scandalous, or washed with a Raymond Carver-style middle age ennui, but Ashworth writes it with a sense of pathos, sad but never cold or heartless.
“The streets were so empty
you’d think it was the rapture
Our midnight world
Just me & you”
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The style draws the mind back to Marilynne Robinson, and her ability to weave heartbreak and suffering throughout her fiction without ever losing a sense of kindness and empathy. ‘Your Dog’ is another case in point, a break up song in retrospect, triggered when the dog of the now-gone other recognises the narrator, flipping out and barking like he always did. The track is devastating in its own gentle way, though its loneliness is derived not from the surface rejection of a failed relationship but a force more nebulous and vague—something to do with time passing, and the endearing yet debilitating innocence that lies at the heart of so many things.
Coming complete with a video by Karima Walker, ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ is autobiographical, detailing a period of restlessness and insomnia that Ashworth suffered as he tried to give up drinking. The song creates a wonderful late-night atmosphere, a quiet and subdued story of driving around at night, your only company a college game on the radio. As if to up the stakes, it happens to be Christmas too, and no-one writes Christmas songs like Ashworth. His aesthetic and temperament are the perfect medium to capture the strange mix of sad and magical, the way the only promise the ‘most wonderful time of the year’ can keep is that of making tough times worse.
After the daydream pop of The Magnetic Fields cover ‘You & Me & the Moon’ and the instrumental interlude of ‘Walt’s Fantasy’, a lingering weariness heralds ‘Rabbits’. The track pairs a simple and reassuring account of a regular morning (“Woke up late in a fog,” Ashworth sings, “Took a pill walked the dog / Down Levon onto Birch / Heard the sound of the organ inside the church”), with aching recollection (“last that I heard / you’d settled down in South Bend / and married a girl, who’s folks own the bar that you tend”) to make the mundane magical and vice versa. It’s a neat little trick that captures both the simple pleasures of the present and the rich internal dialogue of a wandering mind.
As though to reinforce the commitment to empathetic, outwardly-looking portrayals of suffering, ‘Same Dream’ returns to another trope of Ashworth’s music with the narrator expecting a baby. Though it might well be perceptive, the empathy comes not from Ashworth’s imaginative portrayal of pregnancy but the narrator herself, her struggle through a world that couldn’t care less about her blessing/curse couched in thoughts of another person—her burden directed toward some higher purpose, her dreams no longer merely her own.
The idea could be said to form something of a credo for Animal Companionship, and is reiterated in the strikingly sad ‘Care’. The song paints a relationship through incidences of trauma, a dependency forming within the external violence and loss, two people leaning on one another, propping each other up. The refrain circles around twice, the slight differences providing all the difference. That’s when I knew,” goes the first, in response to a house fire, “that I could take care of you.” “That’s when I could see,” runs the second, a close friend dying of cancer, “the way you take care of me.”
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Again, we find ourselves back at Marilynne Robinson. “That’s what the family is for,” a pastor character asserts, willing his family to be as open to receiving help as they are to giving. “Calvin says it is the Providence of God that we look after those nearest to us. So it is the will of God that we help our brothers, and it is equally the will of God that we accept their help and receive the blessing of it.” Advance Base has stripped all dogma and religion from this message, keeping only the important stuff, though the sentiment of ‘Care’ is exactly that of Robinson’s writing.
“The songs are intended to be a comfort for folks going through their own tough times,” Ashworth explained in an essay for Talkhouse. “Commiseration has always been a guiding principle of my songwriting.” Love need not be hugs and hearts and kisses, and loyalty does not necessarily mean hanging in a relationship beyond all reason. But love is loyalty, and Owen Ashworth has been, and seemingly always will be, loyal to those who need it most.
Animal Companionship is out now via Run For Cover Records and Orindal Records and you can get it from Bandcamp on vinyl and cassette, as well as digital. Advance Base is currently on a mammoth North American tour with other VSF favs like Gia Margaret, Friendship and Lisa/Liza, so be sure to check the dates here.
