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His singing is of a piece with the music, at once clearer and more conventional than ever before and still touched with the reflective spoken-to-oneself melancholy that defines his work.
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It’s the Casiotone defence mechanism: take your innermost awkward lumps and bathe them in rose-tinted easy listening. Ashworth successfully translate this to his new instruments no fewer than nine or ten times on this eleven track set.
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Every song is steeped in melancholy, but the underlying beauty that ties it all together is in the courage of Ashworth's characters to face the unforgiving reality they occupy.
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His craft here does have more to do with storytelling than it does with music making, but these haunting, desolate narratives are very much complemented by the lo-fi, repetitive, yet meditative backing tracks, which are ultimately presented like the lost soundtrack to a movie.
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Ashworth takes us on a joyride with a succession of mostly doomed outlaws and derelicts, with a couple of side excursions into familiar disaffected-slacker-ballad territory. It all adds up to easily the most mature and thematically ambitious Casiotone release to date.
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Q MagazineCrucuially, though, he's lost none of his songwriting skill, with each song here perfectly capturing a mood of reflective melancholy. [May 2009, p.110]
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Under The RadarVs. Children is definitely the most accessible Casiotone release so far, and that's not at all a bad thing at this point in Owen Ashworth's career. [Spring 2009, p.70]