After initially breaking through with the widescreen, ’80s styled dream-pop of ‘Preacher’s Daughter’’s biggest singles, Ethel Cain has spent much of her career trying to escape from that sound, trying on a murkier blend of drone, ambient rock and scratching analogue. “I’m not a fucking pop artist,” the Tallahassee singer once told The FADER, “I reject that wholeheartedly”. Though her experimental release ‘Perverts’ and its follow-up ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ leave little confusion in that department, Hayden Anhedönia’s latest tour often feels like a rejection of the lighter-sounding material that first thrust her into the spotlight.
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At the first of her five headline shows at Hammersmith Apollo, Anhedönia conjures the slightly campy, vaguely spooky atmosphere of a B-movie graveyard, and performs the majority of the show from within her mossy altar, which comes complete with theatrical backlighting and a crucifix mic stand. A show exceedingly light on stage patter, the few words she does exchange with the crowd are unshowy, and more or less invisible to most of the room: “Thank you!” she yells from the pitch-black darkness, in response to a fan yelling that they love her.
Rather than conjuring drama by pacing the stage, or emerging from the twinkling long grass lining the front of the stage, the lighting design instead works overtime to match the drama in Anhedönia’s music. For the viscous, sludge rock of ‘Dust Bowl’ she sings from within a slowly rotating ray of light that scans around the Apollo with hundreds of bright beams, while flickering green and white strobes ramp up the tension of drawn out, instrumental intros.
As well as heightening and filling out the relaxed, demo-styled guitar creaks of ‘Knock At The Door’, the production is also bold enough to equal the weirder end of Cain’s back catalogue – which are few and far between tonight. It’s a set light on ‘Perverts’ (snippets of ‘Houseofpsychoticwomn’ and the title track do make a brief appearance) but the industrial, clanking ballad ‘Vacillator’ is played in full, drenched in searing white light. “If you love me, keep it to yourself,” she sings softly on a song steeped in deeply buried shame.
Mostly though, it is a set largely devoted to ‘Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You’ – a singular album that slows down the Southern Gothic cinema of her debut album ‘Preachers Daughter’ and delves into the heady infatuation of a teenage love triangle. Though the ’80s-tooled synths of standout track ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ and the gorgeous string arrangments of ‘Nettles’ glimmer early on, the show soon settles into sludgy waves of ambient dream-rock that recall the slowcore artist Grouper. Though there’s atmosphere in abundance, the intensity is all on the same register, with little in the way of light and shade, or ebbs and flows.
After ‘Tempest’ is paused and restarted so that medics can assist a member of the crowd, ‘Waco, Texas’ closes out the main portion of the show, before an encore devoted to earlier material distinctly shifts the tone. After the brooding, yearning ballad ‘A House in Nebraska’ and stepping out from her leafy podium for the first and final time, she finally swerves into the poppier end of proceedings, closing out with ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’. Though Anhedönia has admitted she’s not altogether comfortable with her biggest hits, they work nicely in contrast with her heavier, less immediate material, and after keeping the room rapt for so long, the eventual release is even more powerful.
Ethel Cain played:
‘Willoughby’s Theme’
‘Janie’
‘Fuck Me Eyes’
‘Nettles’
‘Willoughby’s Interlude’
‘Dust Bowl’
‘Perverts’
‘Vacillator’
‘Housofpsychoticwomn’
‘A Knock at the Door’
‘Radio Towers’
‘Tempest’
‘Waco, Texas’
‘A House in Nebraska’
‘Crush’
‘American Teenager’