Gig review: Ethel Cain at The Piece Hall, Halifax
The Tallahassee-born singer-songwriter may have wrestled with her place in pop, but lands in Halifax with brio and brimstone delivered triumphantly on her own terms.
What’s in a pop star these days? That’s the question Ethel Cain appears preoccupied by.
The Tallahassee-born singer-songwriter has tapped into a rich vein of sonic cinema across two full-length records thus far, a pair of concept albums intertwined by narrative elegance and sly craftsmanship.
Yet the interrogative nature of cult song fandom remains an invasive subject, one that she has been forced to wrestle with since breaking towards the A-list’s upper echelons.
This inter-festival run of British shows alights upon the cloudswept mugginess of Halifax with the twenty-eight-year-old still backing up last year’s Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You, further twisting the Southern Gothic knife into a bed of haunted Americana and backwater folksiness.
It is music well-matched to the imposed grandeur of The Piece Hall, with its Georgian architecture and sandstone slabs; a West Yorkshire mausoleum that serves as a consonant fitting backdrop for 90 minutes of warped hymns and slowcore sermons straight from the Florida panhandle.
There is brio and brimstone here. Cain’s work has never shied away from macabre theatre and Lynchian oddity, but save perhaps the emo-Swiftian bent of her most hooky crossover American Teenager, her live palate cuts more Slowdive than Springsteen, the dials increasingly turned up to 11.
Janie unspools gossamer vocals above a lovelorn shoegaze echo, while Punish stirs hypnotic post-rock harmonies against pink-hued sunset skies, each built towards ribcage-rattling crescendos. Tempest may be best of all; a drone-nightmare reinterpretation of Pink Floyd’s opus Comfortably Numb that only descends into magnificently sweeping bombast from there on out.
It is all greeted with the kind of feverish screams typically reserved for copper-bottomed stadium merchants, yet Cain seems to harness her audience better now. She offers shoutouts for Tumblr girls and pays a warm tribute to Boygenius, who she supported in Calderdale three years ago.
It wraps up with Crush and an elongated Thoroughfare, the star’s pattern-knit poncho cast aloft in rodeo-rider triumph, the singer and her crack band saluted as they depart; triumphantly loud and on their own terms.