Ethel Cain
Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
DAUGHTERS OF CAIN
Ethel Cain’s 2022 debut album Preacher’s Daughter is based around a partly extra-textual narrative chronicling a disturbing family history in a small, evangelical community in the South. True to project creator Hayden Silas Anhedönia’s stated ambitions of expanding the album’s story into a series of novels and even an eventual accompanying film, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, Cain’s newest release and the immediate prequel to Preacher’s Daughter, helps sprawl the narrative out even further. Across the two albums, the exact intended storyline is obscured by having plot elements referenced through song lyrics, but only occasionally explicitly detailed. Many specifics of the narrative have only been referenced or mentioned in interviews conducted with Cain, but don’t worry, Cain’s die-hard fans have already done the work for you of compiling every known detail. Fans also seem to accept that many details would not be possible to know before Cain writes her novelization of the story, at which point the universe and family saga she wishes to manifest would become something akin to a multimedia epic.
Sonically, Willoughby Tucker takes the slowcore/shoegaze-esque swirling intensities of Cain’s beautiful drone textures from Preacher’s Daughter and turns the “density” dials up to 11. Her sonic experimentation from her previous LP-length project, the ambient album Perverts from earlier this year, has only continued to evolve, with the all-consuming walls of sound in the instrumental “Willoughby’s Theme” and the aching “Tempest” providing an appropriate contrast to the desperate inevitability of the slow, melodic push-and-pull of atmosphere and environment (the latter track seems to close with a field recording) that unfolds throughout the album’s 74-minute duration. The lyrics continue in the same vein as Preacher’s Daughter, with much of the connections in the narrative being left, for the moment, up to the imagination. The listening experience across the saga ends up feeling like a tangled collage of vignettes and brief stories exploring different aspects of the life of this doomed protagonist (the stories seem to be intended to only bear thematic resemblance to Anhedönia’s actual autobiography).
Thematically, Willoughby Tucker ditches the Biblically inspired formalisms sprinkled throughout Preacher’s Daughter, but nonetheless seems to return to familiar concepts in Cain’s discography, such as the alienation and claustrophobia of small-town rural America, heartbreak, and toxic attachment. Religion does come up, though Cain’s fond recollection of Willoughby Tucker (himself a character in both albums) in Preacher’s Daughter songs like “A House in Nebraska” seem to suggest that the context for some of the more violent and ominous stretches in tracks like “A Knock at the Door” is not straightforwardly abuse, unlike the story told later in the debut. Willoughby Tucker opener “Janie” adds an ambiguously defined sisterhood with another character (“She was my girl first / I know you love her / But she was my sister first”)—or is it a reflexive reference to Cain herself?—to the table while melodically lining up effectively with the album closer, the 15-minute “Waco, Texas” which reaches a beautifully cacophonous blast of sound at about 13 minutes in followed by a slow, languishing fade-out.
