#gothic county

[luuurien]

Ethel Cain - Preacher’s Daughter

(Singer/Songwriter, Gothic Country, Americana)

Hayden Anhedönia's debut album under the Ethel Cain name is a breathtaking piece of modern Americana, placing her as one of the most heartfelt and visceral songwriters of our time. Preacher's Daughter is a long, uncompromising album that utilizes every second to Anhedönia's advantage, telling the story of Ethel Cain with its many traumas, beauties and horrors with the gravity and respect it completely deserves.

☆☆☆☆☆

Ethel Cain is dead. The character Hayden Anhedönia's music has revolved around since she conceptualized the character back in high school is murdered in the four-minute instrumental piece August Underground, her abusive partner chasing her relentlessly through the forest before finally catching and killing her in cold blood, mangled vocal loops and Grouper-esque ambiance soaked in blood and buried in distortion. Knowing that, listening to Preacher's Daughter requires the same kind of empathy and respect we give to the dead, to treat the album as the last words of a woman who will never return to Anhedönia's music the same way again. Now, Anhedönia's music is chiefly about her own experiences: her time spent as a kid deeply entrenched in a Southern Baptist church in the humid heat of Perry, Florida, her experiences coming out and being ostracized from that community while maintaining some of her connection to it to this day, the abuse and violence and repression inherent to many of its values, but she uses Ethel Cain (I'll be referring to Anhedönia and Cain as separate individuals to make it easier to tell when I'm discussing the artist herself and the events that happen to Ethel Cain the character throughout the album) as a vessel for her experiences to be run through ("She is the mirrored version of what my life would be like if I chose not to get better,” Anhedönia said in a May interview with Billboard), the resulting music exploring the darkest and most visceral parts of her mind and her history. From all that, it's no surprise that Preacher's Daughter is a massive album: thirteen long and dense ballads - only three of the album's songs are less than four minutes and two of those are instrumental interludes - but Anhedönia uses this hour and fifteen minutes to her complete advantage, creating an immersive and truly frightening world where every instance of Cain's self-determination and potential happiness is defied by fate, be it God himself or the people in her life who took every chance to make it worse for her. But simultaneously, it is an album of genuine grace and beauty, taking all of Anhedönia's influences from 90's Christian synthpop to Mazzy Star and Def Leppard and bringing them together for an all-American masterpiece, Preacher's Daughter primed for full dissection and analysis while packing so many ideas into it that it's difficult to even figure out where to start. But just like the characters within Anhedönia's music, that's part of the point - you're never going to get a simple answer from her. Now, Anhedönia makes that analysis project a bit easier by splitting the album up into two separate acts, the first running from Family Tree (Intro) to the chilly banjo waltz Hard Times, and the second from ten-minute centerpiece Thoroughfare all the way to the final track Strangers, and while talking about the album in chronological order might seem the most logical way to go about things, I've never enjoyed writing that way and find it much more interesting to first touch on the way Anhedönia makes her songs. She's oft been compared to similarly gothic artists with an strong writing arm and America-centric writing style - think Lana Del Rey or Lingua Ignota - but where Lana Del Rey's music grounds itself by embracing the romanticized vision of America everyone grows up with while subtly subverting its expectations, and Lingua Ignota's vicious neoclassical/industrial blends brings out the darkness and anger she has towards the world and the people who abused her, Anhedönia's work is much more comparable to the works of writers like Flannery O'Connor or the mid-90s work of Lisa Germano, more reliant on concepts and characters and the ideas of what we are owed and the ways in which we are both accepted and rejected by the world around us at once. Combine this with the less than approachable design of Preacher's Daughter's songs, and makes the album feel more cinematic and immersive than near any other album to come out this year, Anhedönia fully rejecting the idea of Ethel Cain as a tortured pop songstress that arose after the release of her Inbred EP back in April of last year. Kicking off the release cycle for Preacher's Daughter with Gibson Girl, a languid and doomy blues rock jam about sexual dynamics and substance abuse as Cain is pimped out and hooked on drugs, immediately made it clear that Anhedönia wasn't fucking around when she said she was sick of being called a pop star. With the rest of Preacher's Daughter now out to the world, it's no surprise that Anhedönia's done everything possible to stray away from the expectations others have put on her, releasing an album that is unashamedly dark, instrumentally gorgeous, and lyrically powerful like few other artists out there. Getting into the acts of Preacher's Daughter, the first is the more adventurous of the two as it begins to build Cain's backstory and establish many of the themes the album carries forward through the rest of the songs. After the terrific Family Tree (Intro) where Anhedönia finds religion following her every step and hints as Cain's eventual death (Jesus can always reject his father / But he cannot escape his mother's blood / He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers / But he'll never escape what he's made up of" is one of this year's best verses, full stop), the heartland rocker and final album single American Teenager appears, bringing back Anhedönia's pop sound one single time to show that she's still an absolute boss in that part of her world while not sacrificing the depth in her writing, detailing many of the ideas the rest of Preacher's Daughter develops on - losing faith as you grow up ("Putting too much faith in the make-believe / And another high school football team), dying for a country that didn't care much about you in the first place ("The neighbor's brother came home in a box / But he wanted to go, so maybe it was his fault / Another red heart taken by the American dream"), begging to find salvation in Jesus to no avail ("And Jesus, if you're there, why do I feel alone in this room / With you?") - and with that the rest of the album begins to reveal itself. While all these songs are long, gloomy ballads whose shape is often quite predictable and commonplace for music in this style, that doesn't mean Anhedönia doesn't do a fantastic job with it: the swirling piano progression on Western Nights that rings out like they're playing in the darkness of a midnight gathering as Cain devotes herself to a troubled man ("I’d hold the gun if you asked me to / But if you love me like you say you do / Would you ask me to," the way Hard Times uses the country ambiance of insects and electricity to give Anhedönia all the space she needs to recount the sexual abused Cain suffered at her father's hands ("In the corner / On my birthday / You watched me / Dancing right there in the grass / I was too young / To notice / That some typеs of love could be bad") over reverb-coated banjo that makes for a perfect and heartbreaking end to the first half of Preacher's Daughter, how Family Tree utilize a more post-rock inspired build to show the intensity, fear and excitement that comes with the rigid expectations put on both Anhedönia and Cain by religion; despite these stories been incredibly tough to listen to at times, Anhedönia's musicality ensures that these songs always have something more to them. The crown jewel of the first act, A House In Nebraska, has been around for quite a few years now, but on Preacher's Daughter it serves a whole new purpose, Cain devastated over a lost relationship and visiting the abandoned home they imagined was theirs, Cain using Nebraska as her beacon of potential freedom from everything the world's thrown at her before a cathartic electric guitar solo shines like tormented sunlight before burning out, just like the romance Cain had with the man she would do anything to get back ("And it hurts to miss you / But it's worse to know / That I'm the reason / You won't come home"). Rarely is an album able to be this uncompromising with its form and maintain such a stunning level of thoughtfulness and care, let alone the first half of an album, but here Anhedönia does it with ease, proving Preacher's Daughter's self-produced nature was absolutely the right move for her, nobody able to get in the way of her goals as an artist here. The second side of Preacher's Daughter, in comparison, is much darker and colder, slowly approaching the end of Cain's life and bringing out some of the richest textures and atmospheres on the entire album. The ten-minute centerpiece Thoroughfare is such a red herring with its songwriting and sound, opening with breathable acoustic guitar as Cain finds a new love out on the road and travels with him to the coast, the chance for a new lease on life found in the beautiful and slow instrumental build as Anhedönia holds back the climax as long as she can, the explosive blues guitar solo over dark backing chords feels like the one true moment of celebration on the entirety of Preacher's Daughter - hell, she even throws in a fun little jam band session the last two minutes of the track with hand drums and soft electric guitar as Anhedönia quietly scats on top of it all, it's the peak of her storytelling that helps make the rest of the album click if you didn't quite understand why it was designed that way beforehand. But, as things always seem to go for Cain, this love doesn't last for long: when she does reach California with her new love, all that romance and acceptance she thought was there all turned out to be a lie, the three-song trilogy of Gibson Girl, Ptolemaea, and August Underground, Cain's last moments on Earth before her untimely demise. Out of the three, Ptolemaea is the clear winner, the album's best song by far with its incredibly unnerving spoken-word passage and heartbeat-like drugs, as if you're in Cain's mind while she's under the effects of whatever her lover's got her hooked on, but under the effect of those drugs she finally confronts the darkness, and it is not pretty in the slightest. It is one of the most tense, blood-curdling, horrifying songs I have ever heard, every moment of the song building up to a brutal scream that sounds like it could have come out of an exorcism before falling into huge, slimy doom metal guitars before closing out in a pool of distortion and a prayer. It is like absolutely nothing else you will hear this year, and sandwiched in between the sensual Gibson Girl and anxious ambient piece August Underground it works even better. From there, Anhedönia closes the album out in the afterlife, another instrumental piece Televangelism absolutely heavenly even when bits of distortion and pitch shifting begin to contort Cain's ascent to Heaven, but things aren't any easier for her up there. On Sun Bleached Flies, she reflects on everything that happened in her life, a glorious seven minutes that once again subvert expectations as Cain closes the song out still wanting to return to the man who first showed her what love could be in A House in Nebraska, and in the final track Strangers, she says goodbye to her mother one final time as the man who murdered her decides to cannibalize her, one more wrong done to Cain as she consoles her mother through Anhedönia's use of traditional afterlife imagery makes for a truly touching end to this chapter of the Ethel Cain story ("Don't worry about me and these green eyes / Mama, just know that I love you (I do) / And I'll see you when you get here"). Combined with the majesty of the album's first act, the 75 minutes of Preacher's Daughter are so well done and utterly spellbinding that you can feel every moment of Cain's life along with her, the closest any album this year has gotten to making your world one with the music. Preacher's Daughter is an album that could be talked about for so much longer than this - it feels like an album primed for the kind of in-depth discussions and thematic analysis you'd get in a college class - but the best thing you can get out of the album is a connection to Ethel Cain and Anhedönia's music that is truly unforgettable. Anhedönia doesn't hold anything back here, and if you can get yourself in sync with the unusual structures and sound of Preacher's Daughter, lean heavily into the songwriting and let these dreamy ballads take you into Cain's chilling Americana story, it's such a sublime listen that you only want to know what's next for Cain and her family when the album ends. Anhedönia's still connected with her family - she's stated she's shared the album with her mother and is very open and empathetic to the ways in which the generations before her were hurt and shaped the same ways she was in their hands - but never softens any of Preacher's Daughter's blows because of that, completely taking the power back into her own hands and used her music to tell the story of someone she could have been if things were only a little bit different. In every note, in every verse, in every breath, you can hear how much Preacher's Daughter means to her, how the years spent making this album kept her alive and what it means to her now that the rest of the world can experience it, too. Recently, Anhedönia said "I’m in a much more positive place in my life now because I was able to kind of exorcise these feelings into this record." With how much power and passion is behind these 13 magnificent songs, I believe her every word.

[zytes]

dusk over skyline drive; 2.14.24

[zanderism]

haunting the ghost towns | brenton, wv

[mvdso2]

mvdso

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

ℭ𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔦𝔰 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔇𝔢𝔠𝔩𝔦𝔫𝔢

 📷 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔞𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔱𝔢

[kimberly40]

Built in 1901 and located on North Green Street in Morganton, North Carolina in Burke County

•April 2023

[saltriverroad]

Boyle County Fair

[jaggedplains]

lasalle co., abandoned, illinois, 2017

[escapismsworld]

This is the Glenloch mansion, located in Chester County, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1865 in the Swiss Gothic architectural style.

📸: @trail.magic.luke

[toaster-trash]

“Awk sure I did feel while bad for the poor wee critter asking her to marry him the wee pet he was while civil :(” –my very Northern Irish mother about Seward proposing to Lucy after my gothic-literature-obsessed dad and I peer pressured her into reading Dracula

Honorable mentions were her calling Dracula’s Brides “those three bitches” and calling Seward “the hospital boy”

[oldnorthcarolina]

Lake Powhatan, Bent Creek, North Carolina

[mvdso2]

mvdso

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Delaplane, Virginia

Top photo courtesy vintageaerial.com, 1975

Second photo by Chelsea Yarger, 2024

[oneeyedcatlover]

here’s a photo from 2021 that’s really amazing. i was crazy for wearing this strawberry picking in irvine

[creekbed-burial]

Church Of Atonement

[heartshapedcaskett]

Yes, they'll all come to meet me

Arms reaching, smiling sweetly

It's good to touch the green, green grass of home.