Cotton Mather
Cotton Is King
Label: Elm Records
Format: CD
Catalog: Elm 9212-2
Original Release: March 18, 1994
Line-up/Musicians
Whit Williams - Guitar, Vocals
Greg Thibeaux - Drums, Percussion, Guitar, Vocals
Matt Hovis - Bass Guitar
Robert Harrison - Vocals, Guitar, Piano
Additional Musicians-
John Ratliff,Susan Otten, Joe McDermott, Ross McLeod. Bryan Martin
Produced By Bryan Martin
Mastered By Greg Calbi
All Songs By Robert Harrison
Tracklist
1. Lost My Motto
2. Mr. Should Listen
3. Cross The Rubicon
4. Payday
5. Miss Information
6. Ivanhoe
7. April's Fool
8. The World's Boutique
9. Saving Myself
10. The New King Of Trash
11. The Words Of Shaman Roger
12. The End Of The Line[/size]
AMG Review by Stewart Mason
The debut album by Austin's Cotton Mather (a demo recorded in 1992, Crafty Flower Arranger, was never officially released, although it has been widely bootlegged since the group's belated European success), 1994's Cotton Is King is very good, but it's nowhere near as musically strong or sonically varied as its follow-up, 1997's Kontiki. A fairly standard indie power pop album of the mid-'90s, only Robert Harrison's uniformly strong songwriting sets it apart from similar albums by the Rooks or the Greenberry Woods. Bryan Martin's rather colorless production doesn't put the fine songs in their best possible light, but songs like "Lost My Motto" and the downright Beatlesque "Payday" are melodic and lyrically intriguing enough to make it clear how gifted a writer Harrison is. His voice, which recalls a less choirboy-like Glenn Tilbrook (the comparison is particularly inescapable on the astonishingly Squeeze-like "Ivanhoe"), is pretty wonderful too. Cotton Mather's later records would be even better, but this is a surprisingly good debut.
"purpetrator," in Amazon Customer Reviews, says-
Perhaps it was just a perfectly lovely time in my life, just turning 21 and going to a bar and drinking legally and all, but when I first saw this band at 'The Hole in the Wall' on Gualdalupe, I thought they were perfect! Seeing them made me think more of They Might Be Giants than Beatles; lead singers look similiar. I saw them a few years years ago in the warehouse district, they followed a poetry slam, but I guess I'm just too OLD now for that LOUD music these days. It's weird that they didn't have larger audiences when I used to see them.
Anyway, they seem, at least on this album, to try to smash in a bunch of lyrics into a rhythmically small space. But the lyrics are fun; they play around with cliches. "She's a mystic, a writer and critic, oooh she must have read a book once." Gotta love that. World's boutique is such a pretty song. I also like "No one's better than someone when that someone's wrong." It's such a healthy attitude.
And, although from listening to the intros of the different songs, it's difficult to tell which is which, there is a very nice melodic diversity on this album. The lyrics are printed in the liner notes, and it's a lot of fun to sing along to.
"Men who deserve the fate they got, always say it's sabotage, so I won't, but it was." Really, I love it.
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