Ethel Cain’s debut studio album, Preacher’s Daughter, was a mix of crisply produced Americana and dreamy slowcore that served a morbid backstory about gendered violence and familial trauma. Despite the album’s heavy subject matter, the singer-songwriter’s bracing melodies and detailed lyrics offered catharsis rather than despondence.
Cain’s new EP, Perverts, approaches catharsis differently. Rather than spotlighting the singer’s voice as the narrator of her protagonist’s tribulations, harsh noise and ominous atmospheres are front and center here. In essence, Cain has transposed the darkness of her themes to her sound, letting drones and power electronics obscure her lyrics and evoke a nauseous dread.
Perverts is layered with contorted voices that sound like intercepted radio frequencies from hell. Filled with an undulating, rumbling drone and faint mutterings, the title track opens the EP with a muffled rendition of the Christian hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” that plays like the last groans of an antique gramophone. Like Kristin Hayter, the artist formerly known as Lingua Ignota, Cain presents her religiosity in tandem with her unease, leaping over the line between devotion and obsession: “I want to know what God knows, and I will be with Him/Sent over the edge, I sigh/Flush against the veil, I sing,” she says on the spoken-word “Pulldrone.”
The production and song structures on Perverts replicate the experience of being psychologically unwell, painting intimacy as an affliction. On “Houseofpsychoticwomn,” the words “I love you” sour when repeated upward of 20 times over a mosquito-like buzzing. Cain’s character doesn’t just feel love, she’s consumed by it. Her voice, too, is pitched down and shrouded in fuzz, leaving her unrecognizable and torturously out of reach.
Even the spacious “Vacillator,” in which Cain channels Nicole Dollanganger through cooing enticements, deflates her sensuality, creating a sense of languor. The song’s glacial pace and trudging drumbeat render her sighing invitation to “Close the door/Let me in” depressive rather than enticing. But while downcast, the song is as beautiful as any on Preacher’s Daughter.
The closest that Cain gets to fulfillment here is on the Dante-referencing “Onanist,” where, in contrast to the stillness of “Vacillator,” her expressive voice climbs when she indulges in solitude. Throughout, Echoes weave in and out of more industrial noise, and when the sound drops out, we’re left with Cain’s jittering voice insisting, “It feels good.”
Ultimately, the tragedy of Perverts is that Cain seems to decide that love itself is a perversion, perhaps because her experiences of it have been marked by abuse. “I am punished by love,” she sings on the gorgeous “Punish,” before being swept up by a wave of blown-out electric guitar. The distortion finally lifts with the serene closer “Amber Waves,” in which Cain chooses drugs over love, asking, “Is it not fun/In the cataton-I-A?/Maybe it’s true/You were nothing to me.” Like Preacher’s Daughter, Perverts is a moving character portrait. This time, though, Cain’s protagonist finds peace and quiet not in literal death, but in the death of love.
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