At a critical juncture in James Mangold’s recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, we hear leading man/reigning it-boy Timothée Chalamet plainly state the film’s central premise. “Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be someone else,” Timmy-as-Bob mumbles after exiting a folk-singer soiree. “They should just let me be.”
If the climactic moment of A Complete Unknown — Dylan, spoiler alert, goes electric –seems less-than-momentous to younger audiences weaned on a lifetime of “plugged-in” music, the rebellion of “they should just let me be” nevertheless has immediate contemporary relevance. Bob Dylan did not invent subverting audience expectations or (to put it in 1960s terms) “upsetting the squares,” but he did set a template for future pop geniuses inclined to not give the people what they want. Because, sometimes, that is what people want, at least in the long run. Like “Fast” Eddie Felson says in The Color Of Money, “Sometimes if you lose, you win.”
The latest musical iconoclast to follow this path is Hayden Anhedönia, the self-described multidisciplinary artist from Florida who performs as Ethel Cain. In 2022, she unveiled Preacher’s Daughter, a 75-minute magnum opus broadly classified as Americana, though the music also bore traces of singer-songwriter pop, ambient metal, lo-fi indie rock, and ancient dust-bowl country. The lyrics addressed themes of doomed romance, lawless murder, wanton insanity, religious corruption, and Middle American desolation. Given its stately, dark-hued, film-noir-on-the-plains sensibility, Preacher’s Daughter immediately garnered comparisons to Lana Del Rey. But it’s more accurate to suggest that Cain is attracted to the same American underbelly that has also entranced artists as varied as David Lynch, Bruce Springsteen, Walker Evans, Michael Lesy, and Harmony Korine. (Might as well add Dylan and his concept of the “old, weird America” to that pile as well.) Each new generation gets their version of this kind of art. And Cain’s flair for epic melodrama on Preacher’s Daughter might be enough to convince a certain kind of listener at a certain impressionable age that they are listening to the deepest and most haunting music ever made.
The record grew the cult following that Cain earned with 2021’s Inbred, an EP supposedly written, produced, and mixed by the author in the basement of an abandoned church. (No one can ever accuse Cain of not committing to the bit.) Her tally of 2.6 million monthly Spotify listeners is modest by superstar pop standards, but the stan-level devotion of her fans speaks to the powerful hold that Cain’s cinematic, world-building songs has on a rapidly expanding fanbase.
Dig into Cain’s backstory and it’s clear she didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Preacher’s Daughter was released in conjunction with the publishing company owned by the beleaguered pop producer Dr. Luke. One can imagine he was drawn to Cain after hearing her most popular song, “American Teenager,” which sounds like a pop-rock anthem from Taylor Swift’s Red era rendered in the style of Springsteen’s one-man-band demos for Born In The U.S.A. But while the song opens Preacher’s Daughter with an addictive sugar rush, Cain goes back to that well only intermittently. Much of the album is taken up by long songs that favor atmosphere over immediate-gratification hooks. My favorite of these tracks is “Thoroughfare,” a nine-and-a-half-minute mood piece that slowly builds to a soaring guitar solo that sounds like it could have been played by Slash right before he tossed his axe into a desert canyon.
In a New York Times profile, Cain says that Dr. Luke initially pushed to make her songs simpler and catchier. But she resisted.
“Creatively, I have no need for him,” she says. “I have no need for anyone.”
Not that she needed to say that. Preacher’s Daughter announces Cain’s stalwart artistic M.O. in clear, obvious terms. And then there’s Perverts, a new release out today (January 8) classified as an EP even though it’s 15 minutes longer than Preacher’s Daughter. The record is aptly named — it will sound to more pop-inclined ears like the most perverse project put out by a budding star in quite some time. The songs, often, barely sound like songs at all, but rather 10-plus-minute blocks of noise and doom-y room tones with only ghostly snatches of threadbare melodies hovering in and out of the blurry morass. It feels less like a proper album (or EP) than an act of public insouciance, akin to an ear-splitting squall of feedback you unleash on an unsuspecting audience when you want 80 percent of them to leave.
Depending on your perspective, that will either register as a devastating criticism or the highest praise imaginable. I, for one, lean toward the latter.
In that New York Times article, Cain lays out a potential career path for herself. “For this first record, I’ll play Miss Alt-Pop Star and I’ll parade myself around and do photo shoots and whatnot, and then I’ll end up like Enya and Joanna Newsom, where I come out of my little hidey-hole every five years to drop an album,” she says. “But I know I have to earn that legacy. I’m gritting my teeth.”
That sounds like something a Gen X artist — not a Zoomer raised in the unapologetically careerist Taylor Swift era — would say. So, it makes sense that Cain has pivoted to a trope most associated with the fame-wary alt-rock stars of the nineties, the “fame freakout” album. Nirvana’s In Utero and Radiohead’s Kid A are the two most famous examples of records allegedly designed to downscale a popular act’s fame via alienating, “challenging” music. (Though both albums “failed” by becoming multi-platinum fan favorites.) In more recent years, Kanye West’s Yeezus and Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers have updated the model for the hip-hop generation, eliciting mixed receptions in which respect for artistic integrity doesn’t exactly equate to genuine love. Such is the audience’s relationship with the “fame freakout” album: Nobody wants to think of themselves as one of the fuddy-duddies at that stuffy party who want Bob Dylan to be something that he is not. At the same time, sometimes you just want to hear your fave to pull out the proverbial acoustic guitar and play the tunes you already love.
The canon “fame freakout” album that most resembles Perverts is Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, even if it is only a third as long. Like Cain, Justin Vernon became indie-famous by playing beautiful, deconstructed heartland rock songs, and then he reacted to that fame by taking an ugly sonic razorblade to all those pretty soundscapes. Though Cain goes several steps further on Perverts. The 12-minute title track sets a distorted voice that sounds lifted from a decrepit 1980s-era answering machine against foreboding atmospheric clanking that might as well have been serendipitously recorded at an abandoned tire factory. Finally, at around the 11-minute mark, a somewhat melodic synth line floats in, a small reward for those that hung in for the preceding 660 seconds.
Much of Perverts unfolds (or doesn’t unfold) in similar fashion. The most song-like tracks feel more like interstitial instrumentals borrowed from a relatively normal goth record, like the self-explanatory “Punish” or the Cure-like “Etienne.” Of the four (!) songs that push beyond the 10-minute mark, the 13-minute “Houseofpsychoticwomn” is the most effective, with Cain repeating “I love you,” mantra-like, over a chop-block beat and droning keyboard. That might not sound like much on paper, but the piece has a wandering, creeping pull that’s reminiscent of the “quiet” halves of David Bowie’s Low and Animal Collective’s Feels.
So, yeah, this record is not exactly an easy, “throw it on” toe-tapper. (Even I couldn’t quite stomach the tedious meandering of the 15-minute “Pulldrone.”) But while I don’t expect to play Perverts as much as I have Preacher’s Daughter, I can’t help but admire Cain’s willingness to resist the aggressive advances of our omnipresent bop economy. For an artist who has expressed out-right revulsion at relocating to a crowded metropolis like New York City or Los Angeles, her music evidences the benefits of living amid wide open spaces in which time is allowed to stand still. Cain tries to recreate that state of suspension in her music, and while Perverts won’t slot easily (or at all) on your favorite workout playlist, this record will take you somewhere if you give it your time at full volume on a pair of good headphones.
The chronically overused and sort of meaningless adjective “experimental” will likely be applied here. But Perverts isn’t so much about discovering “new” sounds as it is an attempt (successful, to my ears) by Cain to de-center herself and the character she created from her own record. In that respect, the album recalls the title of a much different Dylan movie: I’m Not There.
