Ethel CainsFreezer Bride U.S. Tour Concludes with Transcendent Los Angeles Show: Co

Posted by Aldo Pusey on Sunday, June 9, 2024

At around 90 minutes, Ethel Cain’s sold-out Friday show at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles was the average length of a revivalist preacher’s sermon, delivered to an audience just as transfixed. The fast-rising indie singer — whose real name is Hayden Anhedönia, with “Ethel Cain” as both a persona and a kind of band name — presided over a dedicated and impassioned crowd on the last U.S. stop of her “Freezer Bride” tour, who clung to her every word.

A trans woman who grew up in an insular religious community in Florida, Anhedönia cites the long Gregorian chants that her mother played during her childhood as a key influence; her vocals are by turns restrained and sultry, joyous and meditative, the music is as haunted as it is haunting.

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The floor at the Fonda was full long before Cain took the stage and the merch line stretched up the stairs and all across the mezzanine lobby. Outside the venue, concertgoers clad in long, flowing skirts and heavy makeup smoked cigarettes while waiting in line. At 9 p.m. the curtains rose and the lights cast a marine glow on the singer, who was dressed austerely in a white blouse and black skirt. After singing “Homecoming,” Cain then launched into “American Teenager,” a soaring pop number. As she belted the opening note, Cain lowered herself from the stage into the photo pit, where she then stood over the crowd, stretching out her arms as the audience rippled and swayed to meet her.

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As she usually does, Anhedönia spent nearly as much time in the photo pit as on the stage. She takes audience interaction to a new level, not only touching their hands but sometimes holding them, gazing into fans’ eyes unwaveringly, for an almost uncomfortably long time as she sings. For “Thoroughfare,” a nine-minute-long song with a muted country twang, she traced a slow, deliberate path on stage before retrieving a harmonica from her drummer’s platform and playing a brief solo before flinging it into the crowd. She covered Switchfoot’s “Dare You to Move” — an early ‘00s Christian radio staple that she mentioned she’d recently seen featured on “One Tree Hill” — while “Gibson Girl,” a tale of violent seduction, provided a fitting buildup to the show’s climax, “Ptolemaea.”

Before performing that song, she told the crowd, “When I put my hands up like this, I want you to give the loudest, most bloodcurdling scream you have” — they obliged. Played on one’s phone or in the car, “Ptolemaea” sounds disquieting, almost menacing, until it breaks into a rage built by layers of screeching guitars; live, the lyrics seem wrenched from the singer’s chest. At different points during the performance, Cain stood with her back to the audience, body arched upward as she faced the roof, her long, straight hair falling down her back.

Bent on her knees, surrounded by howling guitar riffs and red lights flashing, Cain let out a final, drawn-out note before staging her own “death” by lying on the stage, configuring herself in a position with her legs together and arms outstretched. “August Underground” and “Televangelism,” both of which have no lyrics, played in the background as Cain’s guitarist and drummer lay a white sheet over her body. The curtains lowered, shielding the three from view for several long minutes before the opening piano chords of “Sun Bleached Flies” primed the audience for the encore.

When the curtains rose again, Cain emerged wearing a long white gown. “Sun Bleached Flies,” which chronicles the stomach-drop moment when Cain realizes she will be alienated forever from the community in which she’s grown up, is soft and contemplative with a marked lack of bitterness. “I forgive it all as it comes back to me,” she sang from the pit, close to but not quite with her mass of accumulated congregants. “If it’s meant to be, then it will be.”

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