In Hayden Anhedönia’s moody, gothic soundscapes, the ageless persona of Ethel Cain confronts the religion, sex, and violence lurking within the confines of small-town America.
In the earliest forms of Gregorian chant, church singers would scale multiple notes in melismatic syllables. The effect is hypnotic; a single word undulates until its original meaning blends with its sound—in some cases, it was thought to induce a trance-like state in its audience. For Hayden Anhedönia, who performs as an invented persona named Ethel Cain, those consecrated refrains were a part of daily life since childhood. Raised in an insular Southern Baptist community along the Florida panhandle, Anhedönia recalls her mother, with whom she sang in church choir, playing hymns and Gregorian chant CDs while she cooked. On Inbred, her third EP as Ethel Cain, Anhedönia leans into her restrictive religious childhood, carrying her voice across the melismas of her youth to reveal its murkiness.
To hear Anhedönia describe it, Ethel Cain is both a specific character and a more mutable representation of a woman throughout American history. She chose the surname because of its Biblical origins; “Ethel,” though, just “smells like mothballs.” In her most concise form, Ethel Cain is a preacher’s wife in the simmering stress of the Eisenhower era—she is a vacant stare and hollowed cheekbones; she’s the decrepit old woman sitting in the first pew, silently judging, embodying what it means to bear witness.
Her vision of gothic piety rings clearest on “God’s Country.” Anhedönia belts multi-note incantations over glassy synths reminiscent of a church organ, her voice echoing as if in an empty cathedral. Swapping verses with witchy emo rapper Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, she evokes the rise and fall of liturgical chant as she sings about drinking blood and prays, “Take care of me, God.” It’s a coming-of-age tale told through Kierkegaardian leaps of faith, effortlessly blending tropes of teenage angst—highways to nowhere, first love—with imagery from her Christian upbringing. “There but for the grace of God go I,” she whispers gently in the song’s plaintive coda. The proverb represents human humility, but the resolve in her voice, gravelly and low, suggests that the balance of power is blurrier. Inbred, in its strongest moments, questions established hierarchies to reveal their contradictory messages of strength and powerlessness.
Elsewhere on the album, we get more secular glimpses of Ethel Cain; on “Crush,” backed by reverberating guitar, she’s an introspective and moody teenager fawning over a boy with a violent streak. It’s not only the guns in his locker—the death drive tracks throughout Inbred: Rapper and producer lil aaron muses about dying in a car crash on “Michelle Pfeiffer”’s Thelma and Louise-esque journey West. “Unpunishable” paints Ethel Cain as a “used and abused” woman of the night, covered in bruises and numb after years of pain. These vignettes of Anhedönia’s invented persona don’t exactly coalesce into a single, coherent image—she claims that a forthcoming, two-hour-plus LP will reveal the full narrative of Ethel Cain. But at least on this EP, her protagonists share a pining for a brighter future, while simultaneously languishing in the confines of small-town, Southern womanhood.
Inbred is the culmination of a half-decade of releases under various pseudonyms; it follows her dreamier pop project White Silas and two 2019 EPs as Ethel Cain, Carpet Bed and Golden Age (after which she signed to Prescription Songs, the publishing house helmed by disgraced producer Dr. Luke). This latest EP adds nuance and depth to both her sound and her character: The bolder guitar hooks she introduced on Golden Age return more defiantly; her light sketches of Christian themes are shaded in with more legible metaphors and visual language.
When she wasn’t listening to stoic plainchants in her childhood home, Anhedönia was surrounded by the searing, overtly masculine sounds of blues rock—Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Cash—blasting from her dad’s truck. On Inbred, she incorporates those influences into guitar solos and howls, which break up the restrained, almost haunted soundscapes of her piano-backed ballads. As guitars whine in the final seconds of “Two-Headed Mother,” the power of her character finally snaps into view. Ethel Cain, the Janus-like matriarch, is defined by duality—victim and predator, follower and leader, a preacher’s wife and a rock god.
0 comments:
Post a Comment