By Duane Davis
Treading close to the edge of bathos, Ethel Cain’s music seems to take place in a space of contradiction: dream-pop hymns that tell stories of captivity, abuse, and queer desire with lyrics set against soundscapes so ethereal they could be mistaken for taking comfort in self-loathing.
Across “Preacher’s Daughter,” “Pervert,” and, her newly released album, “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” Cain refashions the tropes of American popular music: teen tragedies’ bloody last kisses; country and western ‘Shit Happens’ songs; murder ballad folk songs that drip with blood and betrayal, and gospel hellfire and damnation, sinner-repent sing-along songs. Maybe these compositions came to Ethel Cain while she was hitchhiking with Jesus through Alabama with a busted Walkman, humming George Jones songs to herself.
Beneath the sensationalism of the content is a vast subterranean reservoir of the denied, hidden and silenced lives of women, queer people, and victims, young and old, of a harrowing range of physical and emotional abuse. Cain writes not from the mythic center of America, but from its margins, the locked rooms and suffocating bedrooms where official history prefers not to look.
Cain constructs music where beauty and terror are locked in contradiction. In “Nettles” (from “Willoughby…”) Cain provides a wash of ambient guitars and synths that shimmer like stained glass while she sings of intimacy as a wound: the nettle’s sting is a metaphor for violation and its aftermath. The sound is so gauzy it recalls the Cocteau Twins, yet the words might have been taken from a Flannery O’Connor story – violence simmering beneath the surface of a God soaked Deep South Sunday drive in the country: a fatal Last Exit To Tallahassee. That is the paradox Cain inhabits: dream-pop textures carrying narratives of risk and danger. No myth, no soft-focus outlaw lovers. Just the fluorescent hum of a kitchen light, the sticky sweetness of Kool-Aid in styrofoam cups, the sound of a hymn turned dirge because nobody gets out alive.
The songs are so cinematic they often play out like variations on distantly remembered movies. Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” from 1973 is one example. Loosely based on the Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate killing spree of the late 50s, when the two teenagers murdered 11 people across the Nebraska and Wyoming plains. Malick frames their violence in painterly light, turning mayhem into romance, myth, almost a fairy tale.
Cain’s songs have something of that quality where her shimmering, drifting sound creates a strange, unsettling aestheticization. Malick gilds his violence with sunsets; Cain with reverb. The two are not meant to be separated.
“To love me is to suffer me,” Cain sings on “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You,” distilling her entire project into a single, fatalistic confession. It is not coy or romantic, not the half-ironic masochism of torch songs past, but a stark articulation of what it means to live inside cycles of violence and longing where affection and pain become indistinguishable. The lyric hangs suspended in her gauzy, breathless arrangements like a curse or a plea muttered under her breath, a reminder that intimacy in Cain’s world carries a price, that love is never separable from its wound. In that moment, she rewrites the grammar of the love song itself: desire not as salvation, but as slow crucifixion. Most of Cain’s songs can be thought of as redneck pocket operas of love and death with arias scored for angel choirs and rusted-out Chevys. Jim Steinman and Meatloaf might’ve dreamed these songs on a Quaalude bender but Cain seems to live it: Puccini sung through a gas-station speaker, Wagner rewritten for choir girls who’ve been locked in the basement too long. Roy Orbison’s high-wire mini-tragedies of doomed love brought into the 21st Century where the listener is left in suspension, caught between heaven and earth, rapture and ruin – where American music has always lived, and where Cain has found her singular voice.