This could sound like an excessively cynical learn had Anhedönia not spoken candidly about how a lot enterprise shapes her work. “That is my livelihood… I do have to search out the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop track or two,” she stated in a latest interview with The New York Occasions. In her music, there’s a associated and ongoing negotiation between her want to attach with listeners and her want to problem them. For all its conceptual scaffolding, the story of Ethel Cain is a essentially human and accessible one, about navigating love and betrayal; truly listening to it out, although, can really feel like an endurance train, or a check of religion. Songs on Willoughby Tucker routinely stretch previous six minutes. One (“Waco, Texas”) runs to fifteen, with out a discernible refrain or different structural signposts. The tempo is glacial; the palette funereal.
There is no such thing as a pleasure with out ache; because the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you. The uneasy coexistence of magnificence and torment defines Willoughby Tucker: “To like me is to undergo me,” Anhedönia sings in her attractive, breathy murmur on “Nettles,” a slice of pastoral folks. Within the track, Tucker has sustained a crucial damage from an industrial accident, and Cain imagines their future collectively in a second of fleeting fantasy earlier than actuality units in. With its lush imagery and candy delusion, it jogs my memory of John Everett Millais’ portray of Ophelia drifting downstream earlier than drowning. Drowning, fittingly, describes the impression of “Willoughby’s Interlude,” the stormy instrumental that instantly follows—an prolonged mash-up of drones and what appears like somebody respiration closely in an adjoining room.
However maybe probably the most fascinating frictions within the Ethel Cain universe play out not within the music however within the relationships between Ethel Cain, the character; Hayden Anhedönia, her writer; and their shared viewers. With rising superstar comes rising scrutiny, as Anhedönia just lately discovered firsthand when offensive previous posts of hers circulated on-line. The incident challenged an expectation, widespread amongst a subset of pop followers, that singers be beacons of ethical readability. Anhedönia can’t—and shouldn’t—be anticipated to steer us into the sunshine. Nonetheless, I would like extra from her than darkness. There’s one thing a bit too apparent about the way in which the coastal media class has embraced her grim, sweeping visions of rural America. It’s less complicated, I suppose, to see on the purple coronary heart of the nation in spooky diorama type—validating our assumptions concerning the bleakness of life there—than to, say, discuss to a Republican.
I thought of this whereas listening to the album’s nearer, “Waco, Texas.” (That is the 15-minute one; the thoughts wanders.) The title is loaded, however Waco seems to be extra signifier than topic—a sort of shorthand for the themes of spiritual zealotry and violent demise that recur in Cain’s catalogue. (Early demos of this track circulated on-line in 2022, earlier than Donald Trump held his first 2024 presidential marketing campaign rally within the metropolis.) Anhedönia appears to be reaching for a grandiose concluding assertion, however it’s a modest couplet that basically stands proud: “I’ve been choosing names for our youngsters/You’ve been questioning the way you’re gonna feed them.” An financial marvel, it’s full of extra hope and dread and disaffection than the entire quarter-hour of fabric surrounding it. You don’t have to shoot the big-budget movie, it seems, when a house film will do.
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