When the lights dimmed in anticipation of Ethel Cain’s set commencing, the screams of her baying fans gave the decibel-shattering playback of “Willoughby’s Theme” a good battle for who could be loudest. As the lights on stage started to flash bright white then green this near-psychosis grew in pitch and fervour.
Sure, those who had been in the building for 9Million’s support set (which was a very healthy number) had already caught a glimpse of their queen when she hopped onstage to deliver a powerful vocal solo to the Toronto septet’s jammy and heady punk noise.
But since their triumphant finale, the stage had become adorned with drooping trees and grassy augmentations, alongside various platforms for Cain’s band. At the centre was one for herself with a crucifix for a microphone stand: a veritable pulpit in the midst of this Southern Gothic churchyard. Her followers were now more than ready to hear her sermon.
The howls of adoration reached fever pitch as she finally stepped onto her mount, then quickly came into unison to hum, sway and mouth along with the slow burning “Janie”. The smoke cannons were on overdrive and in combination with the brightly flashing lights, this made the band – and Cain especially – seem like apparitions in a graveyard under a full moon.
What followed was essentially the first half of recent album Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You played in sequence – but played LOUD. As an ageing and experienced concertgoer I have finally succumbed to wearing earplugs at shows and this is one I was seriously thankful to have them for. The vast majority of those in the audience were probably around half my age and I doubt many had any protection, which I’m sure they wouldn’t have cared about in the moment, but I do wonder if some woke up the following morning with a ringing in their ears and wondering about their long team auditory health. Probably not.
Some others who surely did wake up this morning feeling a bit worse for wear were the numerous people who passed out during the show. People fainting during gigs is not a rarity, but this show was brought to a halt at least four times over the course of the night, which stalled the momentum somewhat.
This became particularly frustrating to me in the set’s middle section when Cain played three of my favourite songs back to back. The monolithic “Dust Bowl” – to which I’m sure many people were screaming along, though all I heard was the fire coming from the stage – was brought to an abrupt halt due to a crowd emergency. Cain and co then detoured from Willoughby Tucker into a couple of titanic tracks from Perverts; the mind numbingly dense and dark “Punish” and the powerfully eerie “Onanist”. However, both were also interrupted and restarted due to issues in the audience, which did hamper their impact a little.
Not that the band or Cain showed any signs of frustration, they were absolutely professional, closing down their walls of drone to make sure people got the help they needed, then lurching straight back into them a couple of minutes later when the issue was resolved. Any feeling of blue balls while the sound went down and the lights went up were cured quite rapidly and satisfyingly.
Before returning to Willoughby Tucker, Cain reached even deeper into her bag to “Misuse Oh”, from her 2019 debut Carpet Bed EP. What is a relatively light and skeletal gothic Americana track on record was brought into line with the rest of the evening’s offerings with a beautifully whining guitar coiling around Cain’s icy vocals. This was a relatively subdued moment for the audience to catch their breaths before the band returned to Willoughby Tucker and delivered the album’s genuinely epic final pairing.
“Tempest”, although again interrupted by an audience mishap, was genuinely hypnotic in the way it built from spectral, echoing voice and piano to a plundering downpour of noise and emotion. “Waco, Texas” took the vibrations of that song – which already had the whole building in its sway – rumbled it even further and deeper. It was a long, slow detonation that was as sweet as it was savage.
Ethel Cain and the band left the stage at that point. They could have easily left it there and people would have felt like they’d got their money’s worth, but then again – what about Preacher’s Daughter? The audience got their just desserts in the encore which, while still loud, felt a lot more like a pop concert. For “Thoroughfare”, Cain came down from her pulpit and engaged with the crowd more intimately, prowling the stage’s perimeter. When it came to playing her smash hit “Crush” (85 million Spotify plays and counting) it became a duet between herself and the crowd who traded off the now-iconic lines like “His daddy’s on death row, but he’ll say it with his chest, though” and “I owe you a black eye and two kisses”.
After that, there was only one place the night could go in its finale and that was the even bigger smash hit “American Teenager”. The song has an enormous mythology around it at this point and how it pertains to Ethel Cain the person and performer, but in the live setting it just becomes a fucking great song to rock out to. From the front to the back o the building – including the people selling merch by the exit – everyone was bobbing and singing along with unbridled enthusiasm. A sure sign of a job well done.
