The fate of Ethel Cain, the titular preacher’s daughter, unravels in God’s country of interstate gas stations, fire-and-brimstone televangelists, and beat-up bars. While the title echoes that of Loretta Lynn’s seminal country album Coal Miner’s Daughter (1971) on Southern womanhood, Preacher’s Daughter eschews the “pull yourself up the bootstraps” optimism presented in the former, and instead provides a violent take on innocence lost.
The concept album, by Tallahassee native Hayden Anhedönia, centers on the character of Ethel Cain, explored in the earlier EPs Golden Age (2019) and Inbred (2021). The genre-crossing 13 tracks tell the third act of Cain’s life. While “American Teenager” has the catchiness of a Taylor Swift-on-benzos-song, the rest of the album quickly devolves into baroque country-rock hymns. The album has a two-track climax first with “Ptolemaea,” then “August Underground.”
The title of “Ptolemaea” references Dante’s Inferno, specifically the ninth circle of hell where traitors to their guests (such as Ptolemy) reside, foreshadowing the plot of the six-plus minute track. A distorted voice in the ambient metal track tells Cain “bless be the / Daughters of Cain / Bound to suffering,” unveiling Anhedönia’s carefully crafted narrative.
The melodic “August Underground” tells the tale of Cain’s ultimately futile attempt to escape from the hands of her captor and murderer. It is also a reference to the 2001 exploitation horror film of the same name, wherein the film ends with the uncertainty of whether one of the victims, who tries to escape, survives.
With the layers of pop culture references, a meeting point of the high and the low, it should be no surprise that Cain got her start on tumblr. In the zeitgeist, there has been a revival of 2010s tumblr culture, specifically revived as “girl blogging,” and the focus of the feminine and violent. Preacher’s Daughter is Lana Del Rey for the Virginia Woolf girlies.
P.S: I’ve always been a simp sucker for concept albums—Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973) and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Murder Ballads (1996) come to mind—and Cain’s concept delivers. Listening to the album, I could feel the wind and dirt flying through my hair while driving down highways in flyover states, I could picture “crying in the light of the tv static” of the CRTs of yesteryear, without ever leaving my desk. Although, as a former Catholic and failed academic, the intertextuality of Preacher’s Daughter was probably the highlight of the album.
(This was adapted from my excerpt for “Six Albums We Dissociated On Our Bedroom Floors to in 2022.”)