About 10 years ago, Tubs vocalist and guitarist Owen “O” Williams began writing a novel. It was to become a way for him to process grief after losing his mother—folk musician Charlotte Greig—to suicide. He set out to write what he referred to in a recent Substack post as a “Ottessa Moshfegh rip-off novel” about two twins who shared his backstory. As the son of a novelist, Williams had always envisioned himself becoming a fiction writer. His mother’s death gave him a chance to work on a draft. “I made sure to mention the suicide of my mother,” he wrote about his morbid muse.
But the novel never caught on, and Williams quickly realized that, perhaps, his work wasn’t a page-turner because he kept a lot of the truth about himself and his trauma hidden. He wasn’t honest enough with himself, even under the guise of fiction. After all, the magnitude of truth is the key ingredient for any art that’s worth a damn, even the made-up kind. “I’d been scrupulous about withholding any pain or longing,” he furthered in that post, adding that he “saved it all for the final two sentences, which I hoped would be a glimpse into a subterranean world of grief.”
A decade has passed since his failed novel attempt, but Williams has finally found the right words to say. On Cotton Crown, the Tubs’ second album, he grapples with his mother’s death head on, going as far as putting a picture—shot in a graveyard long ago—of Charlotte breastfeeding him on the cover (the photo was captured around the release of her debut album, Night Visiting Songs). It’s a deliberately intimate image to use; Williams is no longer hiding behind any characters from a fiction novel.
He has always written with sort of an oddball, self-deprecating charm. On the Tubs’ debut album, Dead Meat, he referred to himself as a “bootlicker,” an “arselicker” and a “sniveling sycophant.” On Cotton Crown, Williams is even more self-conscious, but his acrimony is mostly aimed at his own grief and the awkward spotlight it casts upon him. His view of loss, like on the jangly first single “Freak Mode,” is less about how devastating it is and more about how profoundly weird it makes everyone around him act, especially when it comes to dating. “I know it is boring, I’m aware of it. I know it is heinous, I don’t care at all,” he sheepishly admits in the chorus. In the vacuum of Cotton Crown, these messy feelings and defeatism feel earned, because tragedy is a messy thing by nature, especially when it comes at the hand of losing a parent. “I do it to myself,” Williams laments on the rousing pub-rocker “Chain Reaction,” the Tubs’ own version of “Boys in the Better Land,” perhaps.
And therein lies the charm of Cotton Crown: The juxtaposition of Williams’ words with the bright jangle rock within is what makes the album an enticing listen. Guitarist George Nicholls, bassist Max Warren and drummer Taylor Stewart play with a high-level intensity and togetherness, and the music they make will sound familiar to anyone who might’ve put “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” next to ”I Believe” from Life’s Rich Pageant on a mixtape. The ringing guitars and high BPMs make Williams’ morose storytelling go down smoothly, like finding out a pint of Guinness is not as heavy as it seems. Even when the Tubs are channeling Johnny Marr on “Narcissist,” or Bob Mould on the yearning “One More Day,” the music sounds fresh—despite the obvious borrowing from sounds made popular on college radio stations during the Reagan years. All the while, the Tubs’ music is never bogged down by the lyrical content. It’s never dour, always moving.
“Strange” is what ties all of Cotton Crown together, where the “subterranean world of grief” is laid bare in Williams’ own roundabout way. It’s a song he took a decade to write, afraid of sounding too corny on the mic. It’s the most autobiographical song Williams has written so far, one that features his own sideways humor about the weirdness of grieving, for both himself and the people around him. It also happens to be the sunniest-sounding track on Cotton Crown. And what does Williams have to say at the end of this momentous song about his dead mother, the one that took him so long to write? “I’m sorry / I guess this is it.”
Jeff Yerger is a freelance music writer, musician, and hockey-loving sicko based in Charlotte by way of Philadelphia by way of NJ whose work has also appeared in Stereogum, SPIN, the Recording Academy, Treble, and others. He enjoys both the Collins and Gabriel eras of Genesis equally, and would very much like the New York Rangers to win a Stanley Cup sometime soon. Also, Go Birds.
