The Tubs Cotton Crown

The Tubs' second album, Cotton Crown, sees the Celtic Jangle boyband venture into darker, more personalterritor y while continuing to hone their highly addictive brand of songcraft. It 's a true level up album whichsees the band expand their sonic palette to take in a kaleidoscopic range of influences: everything fromsoulful pub rock (Chain Reaction) to Husker Du aggression (One More Day) to melancholy sophisto-pop(Narcissist) gets a look in. As Pitchfork noted, The Tubs see jangle as a `vast world of moods and muses' andCotton Crown sees them continuing to explore this world and creating a distinctly Tub-ular sound in theprocess.This is in no small part down to Owen `O' Williams' vocal performance- often compared to a youngRichard Thomson- and his frank, bleakly funny lyric writing. Cotton Crown sees him delve further into hisfavourite themes of love-psychosis, unsympathetic mentally ill behaviour, and the humiliations of being amusician in London. This time around, however, there's a palpable sense of risk in his self assessments/confessions.No more so in the track's closing track Strange- an accounting of the clumsy, intrusive, well-meaningsocial interactions that took place in the period following the suicide of his mother (the folk singer CharlotteGreig.) As Williams says: "I'd tried a few times to write a song about it. The result had always seemed eithermawkish, simplifying or like I was hawking my trauma. But then this one came out, and it felt right because itlooked at something smaller: the weird, unsatisfying, strangely funny ways everyone, including myself, actedafter the dust settled." The album artwork features an image of Williams as an infant being breastfed by Greigin a graveyard- a promotional shot taken around the release of her debut album (the re-issue of which wasfeatured in The Guardian in 2023.)The essential trick Cotton Crown plays is to offset Williams' lyrical bleakness with joyous, hook-laden blastsof pop perfection. This is largely down to th...