Hear again to Ethel Cain’s 2022 debut Preacher’s Daughter and also you’ll hear glimmers of the daring flip into darkish ambient she has now taken with Perverts. Across the edges of the widescreen pictures of ambivalent American life crept deep, disorienting terror; the Florida-born artist might have swung for the fences with the cavernous snare and pearly guitar tones of “American Teenager,” however she additionally groaned in opposition to a loop of buzzing flies within the opening bars of “Ptolemaea.” Her second LP now zooms shut on the rot undergirding her Southern Gothic storytelling. Splayed between Nurse With Wound and Grouper, it sheds the cathartic American songwriting traditions that earned Cain a devoted following amongst sleep-deprived Tumblr youngsters and former U.S. presidents. There are not any extra open roads or goals of escape on this dimly lit hell. Whereas Preacher’s Daughter spilled with expansive landscapes, detailed scenes, and loads of characters to populate them, Perverts holes up within the Blair Witch basement or the hermetically sealed home of Skinamarink. It’s 89 minutes of claustrophobia and dread attenuated by mild clearings. What scant aid it affords is available in whispers.
The album opens—courageously and brilliantly—with a terrifying 12-minute title monitor. Stuffed with warbling hymns, indecipherable dialogue, and gaunt silences, “Perverts” is the form of recording that may nicely tackle a lifetime of its personal as creepypasta, believed to curse and hang-out its listener, very similar to the Caretaker’s music did in 2020. Whenever you hear a garbled voice issuing a command you are feeling compelled to obey or else, and you’ll’t make out in any respect what it’s saying? That’s good horror. Proper off the bat, “Perverts” plunges you into the stew of your individual anxiousness.
Between spoken-word ruminations on sexual disgrace—“Masturbator!” Cain spits from the shadows—emerge slow-burning songs of delicate intimacy. Her voice has by no means sounded higher than it does on “Onanist,” “Punish,” and “Amber Waves”; multi-tracked over the smog of distorted guitars, it scrapes off the lacquer that clung to it on earlier releases. By releasing herself from concrete narratives and pop payoffs, Cain veers into a few of her most advanced and emotive vocal performances but. A music like “Punish” doesn’t inform a narrative you may think about on a film display, however it does constellate profound emotions of nausea, rejection, and powerlessness. “Nature chews on me,” Cain muses in opposition to reverberating piano, a slight voice urgent in opposition to the nice maw of the world.
Perverts is an terrible lot to absorb one sitting, and it usually feels cut up between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of sluggish however structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Each types converge thematically on the identical tortured core, however the swap between them may cause whiplash. On the 13-and-a-half-minute “Housofpsychoticwomn,” an artificially deepened voice repeats “I like you” to the purpose the place it begins to sound like a risk—a rumination on how love can manipulate and punish its object as simply as it might consolation. Instantly after that train in white-knuckling, the album transitions into the jarringly mild “Vacillator,” which rises shining and clear, by comparability, from the poisonous swamp.
If Preacher’s Daughter forged a penetrating lens on the violence embedded within the establishments of the church, the couple, and the nuclear household, Perverts tightens Cain’s scope to the lone, distraught human physique. American Christian upbringings warn in opposition to bodily pleasure, inculcating a basic battle on the stage of the senses. The physique seeks and rewards sexual launch; the church condemns it; self-loathing weaves into self-satisfaction. Perverts sifts by the psychic wreckage of that conundrum. Cain has at all times rendered triumph from abjection. Right here, she discards the impulse to soar out of darkness and opens her mouth to let it in as a substitute.