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Vs. Children Image
Metascore
79

Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews What's this?

User Score
8.4

Universal acclaim- based on 7 Ratings

  • Summary: This is the second release in 2009 for Owen Ashworth following last month's release of his compilation album, Advance Base Battery Life.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 9
  2. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. 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.
  2. Under The Radar
    80
    Vs. 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]
  3. Q Magazine
    80
    Crucuially, though, he's lost none of his songwriting skill, with each song here perfectly capturing a mood of reflective melancholy. [May 2009, p.110]
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Mojo
    60
    Cumulatively, the combination of Ashworth's sub-Bill Callahan levels of vocal animation and the mid-paced songs with tolling chord changes can err towards the enervating rather than the enigmatic, but funkier beats and mellotron give White Jetta a lift. [Jun 2009, p.96]

See all 9 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of
  2. Mixed: 0 out of
  3. Negative: 0 out of