Shortly earlier than founding his jangle quartet the Tubs, Owen Williams poured himself into a really completely different ardour challenge: a prickly novel impressed by the suicide of his mom, folks singer and author Charlotte Greig. “It was 2016 and the Trauma Industrial Complicated was revving into gear,” Williams defined in a Substack publish; “I wished to be exploited too.” Alas, he recounts, the market was not as ripe for his fashion of unsentimental grief as he’d anticipated. Each agent handed on the guide, and he didn’t take the rejection properly: “There’s a particular sort of humiliation in failing to hawk your large tragedy.”
The sunshine on the finish of his spiral of sleepless, Xanax-addicted months got here partly from the surprising success of the Tubs, who had been attracting curiosity past the area of interest corners that also get excited a few new jangle-pop album. After the nice and cozy reception to the band’s dourly tuneful 2023 debut Lifeless Meat, the thought nagged at Williams: Maybe there may be a again door to repurpose just a little little bit of the novel that no one wished. He discovered that the songs for the Tubs’ follow-up Cotton Crown got here rapidly.
Cotton Crown doesn’t shy from the inherent discomfort of the subject material. That’s the artist’s mom on the album cowl, breastfeeding a new child Williams in a graveyard in a black and white picture initially used for one in every of her 7″s. The closing music, “Unusual,” contains an anecdote a few stranger grabbing Williams’ arm at his mom’s wake and suggesting he may write a music about it, an origin story he appendixes with an apology (“Properly, whoever the hell you might be/I’m sorry, I assume that is it”). “The Factor Is” opens the document with the sort of self-loathing endemic of any individual who’s going via an excessive amount of shit to be any good in a relationship.
The distinction between a tragic music and a tragic novel, after all, is that given their in-and-out nature, unhappy songs aren’t practically as suffocating—particularly not the best way the Tubs’ play them. Regardless of Williams’ glum lyrics and chilly, stricken voice, the music all the time chugs alongside merrily. “Freak Mode” barrels ahead with the pep of Bob Mould at his most frolicksome, whereas the jubilant “Narcissist” rings out with Johnny Marr chime. Even Williams’ dispatches from the deepest throes of melancholy are performed as absolute romps. “By some means sitting in my empty room/Is the one factor I wanna do,” Williams sings on “Phantasm” over rollicking pub rock.
As all the time, guitarist George Nicholls and backing vocalist Lan McArdle function the sugar and creamer to Williams’ black espresso. (McArdle, William’s previous bandmate in Joanna Ugly and current one in Ex-Vöid, isn’t a full member of the Tubs, but their harmonies are so integral to the pleasure that it’s tough to think about their albums with out them.) If Lifeless Meat performed like a misplaced IRS Information launch from 1987, Cotton Crown performs like one from 1988—a contact clearer, a contact extra refined, maybe, however basically of a chunk. The album’s unbelievable feat is that, even with its inherent tragedy, Cotton Crown is one way or the other a good breezier, extra agreeable hear. It’s not typically that sorrow goes down so simply.
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