An album as joyous as it is troubled, Cotton Crown makes good on the promise of the Tubs’ assured debut, 2023’s Dead Meat. At heart, these Welsh Londoners are a rousing DIY punk band, albeit as skilful at channelling Johnny Marr filigree (courtesy of guitarist George Nicholls) and anthemic indie rock as they are vintage songcraft. The LP’s title is a Sonic Youth reference, but there’s more than a little Hüsker Dü running through it.
Deliciously, frontman Owen ‘O’ Williams’s sonorous voice also recalls that of folk rock hero Richard Thompson, adding to the pile-up of guitar history supercharged on this swift, superb record. The snarling, cooing Williams wants us to know that he is “a scammer in the world of love” (the caustic Chain Reaction) and “an arsehole, baby” (Fair Enough). But he knows he’ll “get away with it” (The Thing Is).
A blistering eight-song run of relationship angst and romantic self-revelation is followed by a sucker punch: Strange, a rug-pulling track about how awkwardly people behaved after Williams’s mother’s suicide (“I found out the method from an article in WalesOnline”). That’s the late folk singer Charlotte Greig on the cover, breastfeeding the infant Williams in a graveyard. An exceptional record.
