Shortly before founding his jangle quartet the Tubs, Owen Williams poured himself into a very different passion project: a prickly novel inspired by the suicide of his mother, folk singer and writer Charlotte Greig. “It was 2016 and the Trauma Industrial Complex was revving into gear,” Williams explained in a Substack post; “I wanted to be exploited too.” Alas, he recounts, the market was not as ripe for his style of unsentimental grief as he’d anticipated. Every agent passed on the book, and he did not take the rejection well: “There’s a special kind of humiliation in failing to hawk your big tragedy.”
The light at the end of his spiral of sleepless, Xanax-addicted months came in part from the unexpected success of the Tubs, who were attracting interest beyond the niche corners that still get excited about a new jangle-pop album. After the warm reception to the band’s dourly tuneful 2023 debut Dead Meat, the idea nagged at Williams: Perhaps there might be a back door to repurpose a little bit of the novel that nobody wanted. He found that the songs for the Tubs’ follow-up Cotton Crown came quickly.
Cotton Crown doesn’t shy from the inherent discomfort of the subject matter. That’s the artist’s mother on the album cover, breastfeeding a newborn Williams in a graveyard in a black and white photo originally used for one of her 7″s. The closing song, “Strange,” includes an anecdote about a stranger grabbing Williams’ arm at his mother’s wake and suggesting he could write a song about it, an origin story he appendixes with an apology (“Well, whoever the hell you are/I’m sorry, I guess this is it”). “The Thing Is” opens the record with the kind of self-loathing endemic of somebody who’s going through too much shit to be any good in a relationship.
The difference between a sad song and a sad novel, of course, is that given their in-and-out nature, sad songs aren’t nearly as suffocating—especially not the way the Tubs’ play them. In spite of Williams’ glum lyrics and cold, stricken voice, the music always chugs along merrily. “Freak Mode” barrels forward with the pep of Bob Mould at his most frolicksome, while the jubilant “Narcissist” rings out with Johnny Marr chime. Even Williams’ dispatches from the deepest throes of depression are played as absolute romps. “Somehow sitting in my empty room/Is the only thing I wanna do,” Williams sings on “Illusion” over rollicking pub rock.
As always, guitarist George Nicholls and backing vocalist Lan McArdle serve as the sugar and creamer to Williams’ black coffee. (McArdle, William’s past bandmate in Joanna Gruesome and present one in Ex-Vöid, isn’t a full member of the Tubs, yet their harmonies are so integral to the pleasure that it’s difficult to imagine their albums without them.) If Dead Meat played like a lost IRS Records release from 1987, Cotton Crown plays like one from 1988—a touch clearer, a touch more refined, perhaps, but fundamentally of a piece. The album’s improbable feat is that, even with its inherent tragedy, Cotton Crown is somehow an even breezier, more agreeable listen. It’s not often that sorrow goes down so easily.
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