Owen Williams wrote the last Tubs album, Cotton Crown, in the midst of a breakdown. But the harder you squint at their catalog, the harder it is to surmise what is breakdown and what is not. The Welsh singer’s unreliable narrators slip between gurning heartache and a self-sniping internal monologue that says cruel things you would never accept from a friend. His trade is failure anthems set to jangly folk-rock that stops short of storming the barn. Their darkest snapshots of tragedy and depression are often their funniest and winningest. On “Heaven or London” from their new record, Hard Life, Williams portrays himself as “the singer of a rip-off band” who is “wanking himself into an early grave,” playing “farm simulator,” and, for some reason, claiming to “write for The New York Times.”
There is no tried-and-true path to success for a man like this, and it is unclear if Williams would take it. “I don’t wanna sell out this tour,” sings another of his narrators over duelling guitar and fiddle. “Don’t wanna play with the Tubs anymore/If you don’t love me.” The Tubs are the sort of band that has been down on its luck for so long that “down with luck” becomes its manifesto. The only thing for it is a crack at the small time: Write and record quickly, play gazillions of gigs, amble over to America, maybe briefly become the talk of the town. It helps to sign to one of the bigger indies; the new album is their Merge debut. But the uncertain journey ahead will be subject to chance, as well as a pathological fidelity to indie-pop principles: the DIY stance, the affinity for ruin, and the belief that love can make it all worthwhile but, knowing your luck, probably won’t.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Like many oddball bands operating in London, the Tubs’ longing for a dirtier, scrappier version of the city dovetails with a distaste for music likely to make much money. It is hard to disentangle their romantic fatalism from their tech-ravaged industry and dire social conditions. The rewards of a rich artistic life come to those who remain open to the world, which can be hard when paying a fortune for a crap apartment well into your thirties. Money helps, as does delirious self-belief. The Tubs, like so many bloody-minded artists living 40 to 50 years too late, appear to have scant hope of either.
The rest of the band, for all their ramshackle fervor, barely put up a fight against Williams’ defeatist lyrics. Lead guitarist Dan Lucas is new to the fold—George Nicholls left to pursue a life in academia—but his acquisition is a feat of continuity. Like his Johnny Marr-indebted predecessor, Lucas pirouettes, knee-slides, and splatters the wallpaper of timeworn indie-pop chord progressions. His riffs are eruptions of pleasure contained by unbreakable cycles of tradition. Hopes scuppered, pints drained, spiritual losses suffered—there is a mythic inevitability to all this, circling from the workmanlike power-pop rhythm section around to Williams’ lyrics. The song structures resist transformation, reaffirming the melodic order rather than broaching some other, unimaginable plane. Euphoria comes, if at all, in the reiteration of motifs.
