This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year.
It’s an incredible work of fathomlessly deep ambient and drone music, and I was baffled to see something so out-there clocking up millions upon millions of views, until I finally clocked her previous success. Though that was pretty fascinating and baffling too: her breakthrough album Preacher’s Daughter ranged from the fizzy, Obama-approved “American Teenager”, which you could almost imagine Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus belting out, to the crushing doom metal of “Ptolemaea”.
Now comes Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, which raises as many new questions as it answers. It’s back to being song-based but way more integrated than Preacher’s Daughter. There is one big pop moment in “Fuck Me Eyes” but even that is more alternative leaning, sounding as it does like a countrified take on The Cure. There’s a lot of country throughout, in fact, but this is definitely an “alt-rock” album as such, sprawling out more and more with each ever more extended jam.
There’s a great sense of sonic identity to it, and it certainly suits its Southern Gothic / America’s-dark-heart vibe to the ground. However, its uniform dirginess – and this may be deliberate, after all Cain started out studying and copying monastic chants – can leave your attention wandering, though perhaps ironically it’s the longest, most hypnotic tracks at the end where the album really takes off into sublimity.
It’s nice to be surprised by music, and it’s especially nice to be surprised by the fact that an artist at the exact midpoint between Lana Del Rey and God Speed You! Black Emperor is sitting right in the mainstream. This album itself could do with a few more surprises, but the fact Cain is here doing strange things is wonderful, and at its best WTIALY is exactly the sort of dark music for dark times we need right now.
Listen to "Nettles":
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