by I went to the Ethel Cain show and I didn’t see her once.
Hidden behind spotlights and shadows, some may have been clamouring to witness the star, but she remained determined to, in some degree, hide. It was a beautiful choice, one that felt deeply protective of the artist and one that lent itself to exactly the type of concert she was putting on: prioritising artistry and deprioritising quick hits and content.
For a long time now, Cain has been adivisive and tricky artist. On one hand, her music has been picked up by the TikTok crowd, with tracks like ‘Crush’ and ‘American Teenager’ drawing in the young fan base who went to their first concert post-Covid-19 and who many believe never truly learned how to behave there.
On the other hand, her music is the exact opposite of all of that. Cain started with a cult groundswell of fans obsessed over demos that dared to touch on topics no algorithm would go near. From there, she released Preacher’s Daughter, a brutal narrative concept album that demands a start-to-finish listen. After, it was Perverts, a harsh and in parts scary noise album inspired by drones. And then we went back to the story, with Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, another concept piece full of ten-minute-long slow burners punctuated with punching drums and palpable beauty.
Sure, Cain has hits, but overwhelmingly, her discography does not lend itself to an excitable live atmosphere. Finally, on this tour, she’s leaning into that.
Thus, what fans get is performance art. There are periods where Cain stands still and statuesque, not scrimping on the ambient outros. Mostly, though, it was about the light. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a gig with a light show this impressive. During ‘Fuck Me Eyes’ alone, we go from moody darkness to bold pink to strobes. For ‘Dust Bowl’, she’s nothing but a silhouette as the lights spin a starburst around her. Every single song is a visual masterpiece.
The sound, though? Not so much. If there’s ever an artist who should invest in the new immersive sound technology used by people like Bon Iver, it’s Ethel Cain. You can tell her band and her are in top form, especially the drums that sound clean and stadium-scale huge. But Hammersmith Apollo can’t keep up, especially when she delves into the audio chaos of Pervert tracks. With everything clearly on full blast, the speakers compress it to dirt.
The other issue is the dichotomy of Cain’s own fans. Her performance feels like high art, but three times in one night, it’s dogged by the need to stop for issues in the crowd. Obviously, safety is essential, and with a light show that intense, it could have been overwhelming or even hazardous to people despite the signage warning of the same. Obviously, the well-being of an audience is important, but undeniably, there is a certain demographic of the crowd that seems to have fallen into this habit. It’s younger fans who spend all day, sometimes even longer, camped out outside, not eating or drinking enough and then getting overexcited to the point of collapse. It’s not Cain’s fault, but still, her opuses don’t work well when broken up, which is to say, when somebody passed out during ‘Waco, Texas’, interrupting my own cathartic cry, I felt owed an unrepayable debt.
Should we hold that against Cain? No. It’s something to celebrate that when playing a lengthy track like ‘Tempest’ and being forced to interrupt, she will fully start again, prioritising the art and the flow, even if the fame she’s found herself in isn’t exactly the thing threatening it.
There are other issues that could be picked up. I could talk about wishing that the setlist had a narrative like her records, yet mostly, when you’re hearing songs like hers, bathed in light like that, everything falls away. It felt like sitting in the cinema more than anything, watching something stunning, which is seemingly exactly what the artist wanted, as we never really saw her face once.
