This might sound like a very 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 music or two,” she stated in a latest interview with The New York Instances. 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 take a look at 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 endure me,” Anhedönia sings in her beautiful, breathy murmur on “Nettles,” a slice of pastoral folks. Within the music, Tucker has sustained a essential harm 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 feels like somebody respiratory closely in an adjoining room.
However maybe essentially 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 With rising celeb comes rising scrutiny, as Anhedönia lately realized firsthand when offensive outdated posts of hers circulated on-line.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 guide 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 easier, I assume, to look on the pink coronary heart of the nation in spooky diorama kind—validating our assumptions in regards to the bleakness of life there—than to, say, speak to a Republican.
I considered 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 non secular zealotry and violent demise that recur in Cain’s catalogue. (Early demos of this music 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 kids/You’ve been questioning the way you’re gonna feed them.” An financial marvel, it’s filled with 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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