Advance Base w/ Waldemar, Ornamental Horticulture (NEW!) and HopeChest

Over two decades, Christmas songs have appeared throughout Owen Ashworth’s recorded output, from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone’s 2016 fan favorite “Cold White Christmas” to Advance Base’s latest Christmas single, “Christmas Steve.” There have been enough Advance Base and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Christmas songs to necessitate a Christmas Mixtape (available as a free download from Advance Base’s Bandcamp). The album’s worth of songs that make up Christmas Mixtape don’t celebrate Christmas but merely acknowledge the emotional weight of the holiday season and its sometimes dreary realities. Over sparkling electric piano and warm electronic drones, Ashworth sings of lonely Midwesterners negotiating complicated family dynamics while trudging past storefront Christmas displays on their way to dead-end jobs. The songs are funny as often as they’re sad, but always full of the rich humanity that fans have come to expect from Ashworth’s bruised balladry.

Every December, Owen Ashworth tours the Advance Base & Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Christmas Mixtape songs through different corners of the US and Canada. He performs his melancholic acknowledgments of Christmas to holiday lovers and haters alike.

“As both Advance Base and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, Ashworth has traversed America, carefully detailing the coldest Christmases imaginable … It’s all strangely comforting.” – Alex Robert Ross, Vice

“Listeners won’t find reindeer, glad tidings, or piping cups of hot cocoa in Ashworth’s lyrics. Rather, his songs follow aimless twentysomethings, lonely housewives, and troubled siblings as they trudge through the slush, undone by the weight of expectation and the hope for a better year ahead. Anchoring it all is Ashworth’s instrument of choice: a Rhodes electric piano that often rings with the cold, clanging sound of church bells on Christmas eve, a sound that, like the holiday itself, carries certain connotations.” – Randall Colburn, AV Club

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