Pitchfork Reviewed New Ethel Cain's Album. Gave It 6.7

[RAMROD 109,564]

Hayden Anhedönia wanted to make films. But like so many girls from small-town America, her ambitions outpaced her means. Instead, she wrote music: atmospheric, genre-blurring, and (crucially) low-budget songs that could soundtrack a séance. Ethel Cain, a character in her imagined cinematic universe, became her musical alter ego and the protagonist of Preacher’s Daughter, her 2022 debut.

Preacher’s Daughter was billed as the first installment of a trilogy following three generations of women—Ethel Cain being the youngest—in a Southern evangelical setting with evident parallels to Anhedönia’s own upbringing in the Florida panhandle. The story, a grisly travelogue, is pocked by familial trauma, perverse sex, even cannibalism. Its somewhat tamer new prequel, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, has a younger Cain ensnared in a teenage love triangle with the title character and death. Sprawling as it is, the project, so far, coheres around its defining theme of fragility—of life, of love, and of the American dream.

This would sound like an overly cynical read had Anhedönia not spoken candidly about how much business shapes her work. “This is my livelihood… I do have to find the compromise of, we put out an album, I tour it, I make a pop song or two,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. In her music, there’s a related and ongoing negotiation between her desire to connect with listeners and her desire to challenge them. For all its conceptual scaffolding, the story of Ethel Cain is a fundamentally human and accessible one, about navigating love and betrayal; actually hearing it out, though, can feel like an endurance exercise, or a test of faith. Songs on Willoughby Tucker routinely stretch past six minutes. One (“Waco, Texas”) runs to 15, without a discernible chorus or other structural signposts. The pace is glacial; the palette funereal.

There’s something a bit too obvious about the way the coastal media class has embraced her grim, sweeping visions of rural America. It’s simpler, I guess, to peer at the red heart of the country in spooky diorama form—validating our assumptions about the bleakness of life there—than to, say, talk to a Republican.

I thought about this while listening to the album’s closer, “Waco, Texas.” (This is the 15-minute one; the mind wanders.) The title is loaded, but Waco turns out to be more signifier than subject—a kind of shorthand for the themes of religious zealotry and violent demise that recur in Cain’s catalogue. (Early demos of this song circulated online in 2022, before Donald Trump held his first 2024 presidential campaign rally in the city.) Anhedönia seems to be reaching for a grandiose concluding statement, but it’s a modest couplet that really sticks out: “I’ve been picking names for our children/You’ve been wondering how you’re gonna feed them.” An economic marvel, it’s packed with more hope and dread and disaffection than the whole quarter-hour of material surrounding it. You don’t need to shoot the big-budget film, it turns out, when a home movie will do.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ethel-cain-willoughby-tucker-ill-always-love-you/

[alsemanche 93,807]

 

[Roughhouse Dandy 11,514]

The writer really thought they did something here but they failed hard. 

[princedeeblebleble 1,648]

II think it's so bizzare and slightly disrespectful that they use her birth name... Imagine if they keept using Germanotta instead of Lady Gaga in their reviewes.. and then using the business to craft the album line while rating much more formulatic albums higher is just hilarious 

[tomsches 17,397]

It’s about a fictional story she made and that takes Place in the 80s. Why did they have to make it about Trump and the current political landscape?

[alsemanche 93,807]

17 minutes ago, princedeeblebleble said:

II think it's so bizzare and slightly disrespectful that they use her birth name...

Wdym? She's called Hayden and she uses this name herself, ethel is just a fictional character/the name of the project so it's not really disrespectful 

[FfFfFfFF 55,894]

A sad day for the Amish

[ActualPatient 1,681]

3 hours ago, alsemanche said:

Wdym? She's called Hayden and she uses this name herself, ethel is just a fictional character/the name of the project so it's not really disrespectful 

also Hayden is a unisex name!