“The year I lived in Richmond / there was a killer on the loose.” So begins ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’, the opening track from Advance Base‘s new full-length, Horrible Occurrences, out now via Run For Cover and Orindal Records. It’s a song which “does more in three verses than the majority of published stories,” as we wrote in a preview, “one which effortlessly displays Ashworth’s unrivalled ability to mine ostensibly ordinary lives for their brilliant slivers of heartbreak and strangeness.” Not only does it set the record’s tone—the murderer just the first example in a series of calamities, mysteries, regrets and plain bad luck which gives the album its title—but also introduces its setting, the key thread that unites each of eleven the tracks.
Richmond. A fictional town. Generic. All-American. Perhaps belonging to the Midwest if anywhere, but could fit into essentially any state you might have in mind. Owen Ashworth cites Springfield from The Simpsons as an influence on this first fully imagined setting, plus Haddonfield from John Carpenter’s Halloween. And you don’t have to look far to find echoes of Carpenter’s slasher in ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’, though it is the classic story inverted. For the killer sneaks into a bedroom window one night, in search of his next victim, only to fall under the kitchen knife of a woman named Deborah Lee.
Deborah Lee leaves Richmond once the coroner has taken the body, but her story remains, lingering in the town like some psychic stain. “Any child could tell you how that killer died,” the closing verse states, as though to live within the town limits is to be bathed within its ever accumulating history of ill-fortune. “Richmond is just this place where all the bad memories live,” as Ashworth puts it. One he created in part to serve that very purpose.
For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.
It’s unsurprising then that Horrible Occurrences is the darkest Advance Base record to date. The tale of the killer killed is followed by ‘The Tooth Fairy’, a snapshot of a father-daughter relationship that taps into the primal fears of children and parents alike. With his wife out of town, the father finds himself needing change for Tooth Fairy duties, but a quick trip out of the house sees an innocent intention unravel into pure terror. The trauma is deep and double-edged—the parent arriving home to find their child’s bed empty, the child alone on the street, hysterical in asking the gut punch question that forms the song’s denouement. “Where did you go, Dad? / I couldn’t find you.”
There’s no let up with ‘Big Chris Electric’, the album’s second murder ballad in its opening trio. The titular Big Chris falls for Yvonne after working on her house, becomes a father figure to her daughter, soon has a child of his own on the way. Only Yvonne’s jealous ex intervenes and shoots him dead, leaving Yvonne to live out her days with Big Chris’s van in her driveway, his name still stencilled on the side. Again Ashworth twists the story, bending it beyond the trope at its heart. For the song is narrated by Big Chris’s child, now at least halfway grown, living with their mother yet resenting the fact. “I know that she’s had a hard time / raising kids on her own,” as the closing verses start. “We fight all the time / I hate being at home.” The development plays as an added complication to tragedy, both a rejection of the romantic neatness which might otherwise accompany such a tale of heartbreak, yet also an extension of this very romance. Because the narrator offers another angle, another myth conjured in the wake of one taken too soon.
Someday I’ll fix up his van
I’ll keep his name on the side
I’m gonna get out of Richmond
& vanish into the night
The tension at the song’s heart is one central to Horrible Occurrences. Fearing the loneliness and mystery of disappearance while simultaneously desiring its transcendent promise of escape. A sizeable number of songs in the Advance Base catalogue deal with such ideas—close friends now strangers, familiar sights now a leering void—and much of Ashworth’s success as a writer stems from his willingness to maintain a restricted narrative frame. Rarely told more than the characters themselves, the listener is placed alongside them, left to feel the ache of unanswered questions, the latent sense of possibility, and invited to fill in the gaps with stories of their own. The single town concept of Horrible Occurrences is essentially this same device across an entire album. Richmond itself the frame of the stories, as though it were the only illuminated part of the world.
Hence the ambiguity of ‘Rene Goodnight’, where an apparently friendly companion is revealed to have a reputation of domestic abuse out of town (“Now I see you in my dreams / Sometimes sinister & mean / Sometimes sweet as hell / I don’t know what to believe”), and perhaps even the pivotal mystery of the exceptional ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse’. Partners Elise and CJ visit Michigan for a birthday celebration, only for a sleepless CJ to wander to the nearby lighthouse and vanish into the night. To leave town and step into the world, the song suggests, is to risk getting lost in the dark.
Standing under at the tower
Watching the big light spin
Hypnotized by the silver beam
that cut right through the dim
That’s how Elise imagined him
He was never seen again
The closing track, ‘Richmond’, plays like the testimony of one such disappeared character returned. A figure stepping back into frame, now forced to reckon with everything which happened before and since, as though unable to leave old stories peter out into the dark no matter how painful it might be to dredge them up. It’s difficult not to hear Ashworth himself in this character, a reluctant homecomer persevering (sometimes against his better judgement) to share what might be his most difficult, personal collection of songs. “I drove back to Richmond / to see how you’ve been,” he sings. “To learn more about all / the life that you’ve lived / & to talk about CJ / & to talk about Chris / & all my reasons for leaving / & everything that I’ve missed/ I’ve been so sad & angry / I know you’ve been too / but I can’t take the silence.”
But to stress the melancholy and darkness of the album is to miss what has long made Advance Base so special. “[Ashworth’s] is an ever evolving body of work which stands out in its deftness and humility and empathy and care,” we wrote back in summation of his style back in 2022, “bringing to life individuals from across the spectrum of human experience while remaining unerringly attuned to the tender, fallible heart at the centre of each.” The same compassionate attention is present here too, be it in a story of serial killers, strange premonitions or solitary singers, shivering as they make their way back towards home.
“You’ll be fine,” a paramedic tells the titular character in ‘Brian’s Golden Hour’, a teen skater and would-be Days of Heaven-era Malick who plans to film himself dropping in on a homemade ramp from the roof of his parents house only to bail and shatter his spine. “You’re 15 & paralyzed / & lucky to be alive,” as the refrain goes. But Brian doesn’t actually commit to the trick. His only paralysis is a hesitation at the top of the ramp. This horrible occurrence takes place entirely in his head. Yet the paramedic’s words echo all the same. Kind, if slightly hollow. What they want to be true, or need to be true. Or rather what might as well be true inside that moment, until the opposite is confirmed. You’ll be fine. Words so brittle and tender and heartfelt. Somehow the epitome of both security and vulnerability. The essence of not only Horrible Occurrences but perhaps Ashworth’s entire body of work. Voices heard from beneath the weight of all that has happened, and all that possibly could. You might be dying. The darkness might all be in your head. You’ll be fine.
Horrible Occurrences is out now via Run For Cover Records and you can get it from the Advance Base Bandcamp page.
