THE TUBS - Cotton Crown (Daffodil Yellow Vinyl)

The Tubs' second album, Cotton Crown, sees the Celtic Jangle boyband venture into darker, more personal
territory while continuing to hone their highly addictive brand of songcraft. It's a true level up album which
sees the band expand their sonic palette to take in a kaleidoscopic range of influences: everything from
soulful 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' and
Cotton Crown sees them continuing to explore this world and creating a distinctly Tub-ular sound in the
process.
This is in no small part down to Owen 'O' Williams' vocal performance- often compared to a young
Richard Thomson- and his frank, bleakly funny lyric writing. Cotton Crown sees him delve further into his
favourite themes of love-psychosis, unsympathetic mentally ill behaviour, and the humiliations of being a
musician 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-meaning
social interactions that took place in the period following the suicide of his mother (the folk singer Charlotte
Greig.) As Williams says: "I'd tried a few times to write a song about it. The result had always seemed either
mawkish, simplifying or like I was hawking my trauma. But then this one came out, and it felt right because it
looked at something smaller: the weird, unsatisfying, strangely funny ways everyone, including myself, acted
after the dust settled." The album artwork features an image of Williams as an infant being breastfed by Greig
in a graveyard- a promotional shot take

Vinyl release of The Tubs - Cotton Crown (Daffodil Yellow Vinyl). Released through TROUBLE IN MIND and available on LP.