Review: Ethel Cain — Perverts

Music

Ethel Cain
Perverts
Daughters of Cain
Street: 01.08
Perverts =  Phoebe Bridgers/Chelsea Wolfe + ( SPK x Sutcliffe Jugend) 

If you are looking for a fun and lighthearted album to escape the brutality of winter, keep looking! Perverts is the challenging new release by Floridian artist Hayden Silas Anhedönia, best known as Ethel Cain, and it is a 90-minute anvil of death industrial, dark ambient, drone, singer-songwriter and slowcore. The album is a slow burn that rewards a patient listener. There are stretches — and not brief ones — where it feels as though the music has cut out entirely. In fact, “music” is a bold term for certain points on this record which, at times, doesn’t feel that it’s progressing at all, but rather laying out before the listener like an uneasy sea. Each song is at least 6 minutes, and four of them exceed 10 minutes, with grim and austere love songs like “Housofpsychoticwomn” trudging on for a cathartic thirteen minutes.

The album opens with a rendition of the hymn “Near, My God, To Thee,” which warps and distorts eerily before cutting out and giving way to our first glimpse of the cavernousness of the album. Vulgar, scarcely discernible speech erupts abruptly from a dingy canvas of white noise like stark buttes on a desert landscape.

The album is delicate, dark and best listened to as a whole, like a horror movie. In fact, the mood feels very filmic — rife with repeating motifs and striking the same liminal notes as the 2022 horror film Skinamarink. Perverts oscillates between being incredibly intimate — with Anhedönia’s singing brushing against the microphone like a faint breeze at close range- and being completely void of humanity- stretching on for minutes at a time in pursuit of a fraught, moody ambience. 

While the vocals and background feel indelible and pure, the lyrics can be shockingly profane, gradually stripping the coats of pleasant-colored paint off the act of human intimacy. The album is sensual (hence the title) with lyrics focusing on the pleasures of the flesh and the agony of yearning, but these themes that are so often explored in fluorescent hues and rich warm shades are here expressed with the solemnity of a funeral dirge. If you’re putting on music for a hot date, please, please, please, do not put this album on. It unflinchingly depicts the complex melange of shame, wonderment and guilt that sex can elicit, especially when studied through a Christian lens. “Unflinching” might be inapt actually, as the album has an overarching motif of instability and reticence, particularly about desire and the objects of it. In a way, the album feels like one protracted flinch, like a frigid embrace.

All of this gives the impression that I didn’t much care for this album, or that I found the experience unpleasant, but make no mistake; this is an incredible piece of music. Perverts is a real southern gothic work of art: haunting,mysterious and ambiguous. It may be sonically modest, but its weight is definite and its scope is grand. Sure, it sounds a bit like Phoebe Bridgers a la Punisher at times, but it feels more in the spirit of Flannery O’ Connor. It also feels a bit like late era Scott Walker, both in the eerie and dismal ideas presented and in its willingness to alienate the listener.

Putting the oppressive themes aside for a second, the real hurdle for this album might be its length: tracking at almost 90 minutes it is a bit of a behemoth. In spite of its massive runtime, this is an album with no fat to trim — it’s not some bloated prog epic or exercise in time wasting. If you allow yourself to be washed over, to really take in the immensity of this project, it’s an amazing feat. Each track is given an immense amount of space to breathe, an abyss for the listener to allow herself to be gazed into — if she is willing. —tín Rodriguez

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