On Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain’s Jarring, Beautiful Vision Comes to Life
The artist’s debut LP interweaves powerful genre influences and haunting narratives, beginning to chart the Ethel Cain lore
What happened to Ethel Cain? Despite the gags, Hayden Anhedönia’s project didn’t disappear at all. Just check out her Twitter, where she’s known to retweet memes her stans create and let off-the-wall, funny posts loose. Between last year’s monster EP Inbred and a slated performance at Pitchfork Music Festival, Cain is on a brilliant ascent. Inbred solidified her position as a force to be witnessed in American music as she wrestled with the uniquely Southern version of the American dream that shaped her young life. The divinity of gospel, the audacity of heartland rock and the frankness of 2010s Tumblr-era pop collide into an arresting narrative spectacle, portraying the experience of a woman who is intimately familiar with depraved violence, the gospel and the strict social hierarchies of the South and the Plains. The EPs have only revealed a portion of Cain’s lore, but on her whopping 75-minute debut LP Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain, the narrative figure and the musical sensation, manifests a breathtaking account of a woman, her mysterious partner and her troubled family.
Much as Inbred mangled Americana, ambient folk and slowcore into a terrifying sonic experiment, Preacher’s Daughter is a sound all its own. Imagine what would happen if singers as familiar as Bruce Springsteen or Nichole Nordeman were backed by Midwife or Sunn O))). The glamorous and aphrodisiac sound of Lana Del Rey is undoubtedly there, but the thematic and instrumental elements on Preacher’s Daughter possess a weightiness and impulse away from ironic glamorization of the American dream and toward outright criticism that render the comparison only so relevant. At times the record throbs with a noisy, immersive intensity before transitioning into the kind of epic guitar solos that decorated the cult of rock personalities in generations past. This collision of dark ambient and Def Leppard is uniquely American in the best way conceivable.
Cain painstakingly wrote and produced Preacher’s Daughter over four years with a little instrumental assistance from collaborators Matt Tomasi and Colyer, the latter of whom will be joining Cain on her first North American tour. The record opens on prologue “Family Tree (Intro)” with a murky recording of a Southern preacher—the preacher’s identity is a matter of speculation among fans—extolling the significance of the mother as an icon. Cain has an extensive history of playing with maternal iconography: The imprint through which she releases her records is called “Daughters of Cain” and her social media handles are @mothercain, largely as an intentional and playful entry into the cultivation of a stan community. Cain was fascinated by cults as a young child growing up in a strict Southern Baptist household (whose own atypicalities have been described as “cultish”) and by the cult of personality, first around the preacher and then around the pop star (Florence Welch proved an early influence). After the intro, Cain moves into the most upbeat song on the record, “American Teenager,” a synth- and guitar-heavy track with Springsteen-like curiosity around Americana, but even more biting criticism. Narrating the position of American teenagers, drunk and dying, the song is a solidarity anthem, one in which teenagers are not called upon to reinflate the vision of America the beautiful, but rather to advance camaraderie.