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’s musing can be unexpectedlyconsidering her stark image and background. She 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, theThe 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.
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.
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.
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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