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Travis: For this chat and the next, Tyler and I are going to be discussing much newer albums than usual, with each of us picking a favorite from 2023. Up first: my pick, the album Dead Meat by British indie-rockers the Tubs. I generally have a lot of trouble picking a favorite from any given year, and in a good year even narrowing down a Top 10 can be pretty difficult. 2023 was a good year for music, I’d say, and there were plenty of choices I could have gone with here. Some honorable mentions include the blistering hardcore of GEL’s Only Constant and Incendiary’s Change the Way You Think About Pain, Mitski’s mope-pop opus The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, the performance-art gospel of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter’s SAVED!, and returns to form from old favorites Queens of the Stone Age and Fever Ray. 

But a really easy way to decide on a favorite album over a given time period is just to see which one you listened to the most, and for me from 2023 that was the Tubs’ Dead Meat.

A little background: the Tubs are based in London with three of the members having previously been in the punky Welsh garage-rock/power-pop band Joanna Gruesome, who got a little buzz in the 2013-2015 or so time period. Dead Meat, only 9 songs and 26 minutes long, is their debut.

Obviously having listened to it many times and having picked it as a favorite, I have plenty to say about it. But I’d love to hear your impressions coming in as someone unfamiliar with the Tubs (and, I assume, members’ previous and adjacent projects). So, Tyler…the Tubs?

Tyler: Seal of approval.  This album is fab.  Catchy, quick, digestible—plus, it just sounds great.  I like the vocals, I like the hooks, I dig the pure entertainment of it all.

I’m lucky and have about a five-minute drive to work.  Dead Meat has started the morning for me a couple of times, which is a holy thing.  No matter what I listen to en route to the gig, the second or third track always gets stuck in my head.  Here, it’s “I Don’t Know How It Works.” A personal favorite from the collection.

Travis: “I Don’t Know How It Works” is a highlight, definitely. It’s one of a few songs that features backing vocals from Alanna McArdle, who was the lead singer of the aforementioned Joanna Gruesome, and fellow member of the South London Gob Nation collective of which the Tubs and adjacent bands are a part.

Tyler: Let the record show that “Joanna Gruesome” is a terrific name.

Travis: I agree, and though many would probably disagree, I also prefer Gruesome to Newsom when it comes to music listening.

Tyler: Could the two perhaps join forces to form a Joanna Twosome?

Travis: They very well might.

I remember giving Dead Meat a spin early in 2023 purely because I remembered liking a couple of Joanna Gruesome songs and seeing that the members had a new band. I did not anticipate it becoming my most-listened album of the year, but from the first stuttering guitar strums I was hooked.

Tyler: This whole scene is to me, whole cloth.  Going into this week, I knew only—from you—that the principals are Welsh.  Didn’t have any idea what to expect.

Travis: Though it doesn’t really sound like Nada Surf other than that there are hooks and guitars, I believe this too could have a CD blurb from Spin or Blender declaring it a “taut slab of guitar-driven indie rock.”

Tyler: Yes!  I thought of Nada Surf in considering the album today.  Also, the word “taut.”

Travis: And, like The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy, I think it both offers immediate surface-level pleasures–the aforementioned hooks, strong melodies, a solid sense of pop songcraft–and rewards deeper listens.

Tyler: I’ve had it on quite a bit, Dead Meat.  I look forward to those deeper elements emerging as I continue to enjoy it.  It zips right by if you’re not paying enough attention.

Travis: These are seemingly effortlessly catchy songs, but I think that through the vocals and some of the lyrics, there’s also a dark humor and a sense of melancholy to a lot of it. It doesn’t make me sad to listen to it–I enjoy it enough to listen to it over and over again–but I think that sadness is there. And the humor reveals itself in moments like the chorus of “Sniveller,” a cheery refrain about love turning the narrator into a “snivelling sycophant.”

Tyler: Also, the album ends with a rather poignant repetition of “You are always on my mind.”  A melancholy finale.

I thought of Squeeze, whom you’ve recommended to me, and whose East Side Story I’ve been enjoying since I found it in a record shop bin a few weeks back.

Travis: I hadn’t made the Squeeze connection but they do scratch a lot of the same itches. Nicely observed lyrics contained in three-minute guitar-pop songs that are a little more interesting than the average radio bop.

Tyler: This is the kind of music whose lyrics could be termed “literate” and “observational.”  To its credit.

Travis: The musicianship is pretty intricate as well, all within the confines of power-pop. I hear the influence of Johnny Marr all over the lead guitar playing–love a good “muscular jangle”–but also the vocals and lead guitar lines remind me of Richard Thompson in places. Not to play too much spot-the-influence, but the post-punk of the late 70s and early 80s also creeps up a lot. Joy Division/New Order basslines and whatnot. I saw them described somewhere as post-punk pastoral and that’s about as succinct a descriptor as I could wish to have come up with.

All of those things I mentioned are British, and this album is British Isles as fuck, down to lyrics about having “finally lost the plot.”

Or describing losing one’s mind as “going round the bend.”

Tyler: It’s often a real pleasure to hear British vocalists whose accents are pronounced in their singing.

Travis: A band that is known for being Welsh and critically acclaimed I have never not once listened to: Super Furry Animals.

I remember lots of articles and reviews about them in music magazines in the late 90s, early 2000s.

I think I was first not cool enough, then too cool for, listening to Super Furry Animals.

Maybe they’ll be my next favorite band.

Tyler: We’ll dialogue their debut or something.  Things will come full circle.

David Gray is the only Welsh musician on my limited radar.  I like David Gray.

Travis: David Gray was apparently a nice celebrity at the venue my wife used to work at. That is the depth of my David Gray knowledge.

To make a smooth transition back to talking about the Tubs, I read an interview with their lead singer, Owen Williams, and he seemed like the kind of dude it’d be fun to hang out with. Witty, kind of a dork.

Tyler: That sounds like good people.

Travis: Apparently also a ridiculously prolific musician. On top of being the leader of the Tubs, he is co-lead with Alanna McArdle in Ex-Void, who released an excellent album in this same vein, a little more punky, more male-female vocal harmonies, in 2022. He also plays drums in a band called Sniffany & the Nits I have yet to listen to, guitar in another I haven’t listened to called Garden Centre, bass in Porridge Radio (who are decent, pretty big in England female-fronted post-punk band), and bass in another group called the GN Band.

Tyler: Mercy!

Travis: If one listens to Dead Meat and enjoys it, I’d say Ex-Void’s album Bigger Than Before is the next logical step. Joanna Gruesome’s two albums, Peanut Butter and Weird Sister, are also worth a listen, a lot louder and sloppier but not without their charms. 

Not so similar in sound but similar in sentiment and darkly humorous Welsh-ness, I have to recommend any and everything by the noise punk bands McLusky and Future of the Left, both fronted by one of the funniest frontman/lyricists in the world of underground music, Andy “Falco” Falkous.

As for the rest of the concurrent and side projects of the Tubs members, I have yet to dive in fully, but it seems like I might be in for some more fun listening ahead.

Tyler: Yeah, you may well have a plethora of good stuff in the hopper.  More music like this: yes, please.