Illinois slowcore band Good Night & Good Morning were criminally underrated during their original lifespan. Their one full length LP Narrowing Type, an enveloping mix of hibernal slowcore, ambient guitar squall and twinkling vibraphone, was released in 2011 without much fanfare – completely at odds with the neon shimmer of the mainstream indie music of the period – and the group burnt out, vanished, disappeared without as much as a goodbye.
However, in the decade following Narrowing Type’s release, it has grown in stature. As slowcore, once a curious and largely unloved American alt-rock subgenre, has undergone a Gen Z-led revival, Good Night & Good Morning have become cult favourites across sites like RateYourMusic and Album Of The Year.
It will probably not come as a surprise to those aware of North Floridian dream-pop polymath Ethel Cain – the stage name of the artist Hayden Silas Anhedönia – to hear that she was among the Iinternet-dwelling new fans of Good Night & Good Morning. Touring for her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, she would play atmospheric cuts from Narrowing Type before her set, and last November, she joined the Illinois band on stage at one of their low-key reunion shows in Milwaukee.
At that show, Cain performed a detuned slowcore reworking of ‘Punish’ that, by Good Night & Good Morning’s own admission, felt very much like one of their own songs. “I didn’t even have to change the tuning on my guitar for it,” were the words of GN&GM frontman Ryan Brewer following the performance.
Whilst this version of ‘Punish’ doesn’t make the tracklist of her second full length album, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You, it is this direction that shapes Cain’s most fully realised, focused project to date. Its 73-minute runtime is full of slow-moving, patient compositions, where melodies and ideas are allowed to settle and breathe amidst long, winding songs that provide the perfect platform for Cain’s world-building lyrics.
Willoughby Tucker… really splits the difference between Preacher’s Daughter’s Americana-inflected dream-pop and the ambient and drone experiments that engulfed the left-turn Perverts EP. The pure pop moments that earned her a series of Lana Del Rey comparisons on the debut are basically gone, and what remains is an atmospheric, moody, dusty slowcore record, albeit one with a real pop sensibility in the songwriting.
Throughout, she gets ever closer to perfecting her modern take on Southern Gothic, one that uses the frayed slowcore of Bedhead and the malignant, Lynchian ambience of Stars of the Lid as touchstones of equal importance to country and Americana.
Without delving too deeply into the lore of the Ethel Cain records, something vast and fanatically studied by Cain’s most online fans, Willoughby Tucker appears on Preacher’s Daughter as a crucial side character on the piano ballad ‘A House in Nebraska’. A compelling, charming figure who is the great lost teenage love of Ethel Cain. He is the one that got away, and as such, this is a loose concept album of very bittersweet love songs, outbursts of passion coloured by a deep, cosmic melancholia.
The atmospheric ‘Willoughby’s Theme’, the instrumental second track, introduces this better than anything with words could – a soft-focus piano-led piece awash with astral shoegaze guitars introduces our protagonist, much in the same way Angelo Badalamenti’s meditative dream-pop score introduced Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks.
Meanwhile, ‘A Knock at the Door’ has an extended outro with the same technicolour soundtrack quality – forlorn fingerpicked guitar echoes Bill Callahan’s pastoral Americana miserablism, whilst Cain’s vocal harmonies give it a much more dreamlike quality, and banjo-driven lead single ‘Nettles’ is a gorgeous chamber-pop ode to the title character packed to the brim with fragile, wilting melodic ideas.
It is, however, when Cain really shows off her slowcore chops, that Willoughby Tucker… is at its absolute best. Just as the first-wave slowcore bands were always at their best when they managed to evoke a kind of slow heaviness, a la ‘D’ by Codeine or ‘Lullaby’ by Low, Ethel Cain is no exception. ‘Dust Bowl’ glacially builds to a genuinely weighty crescendo with its spidery guitar riffs and reverb-laden drum machines, whilst the atonal guitars of ten-minute breakup song ‘Tempest’ ensure it reaches the same heaviness at its stormy summit.
With Willoughby Tucker… Ethel Cain cements her place in the musical landscape as a genuinely exploratory, divergent, creative voice in the mainstream. It is so rewarding to let the songs here slowly wash over you, they so beautifully unravel across their long runtimes. And whilst Preacher’s Daughter and Perverts have helped her amass a devoted fanbase for two very different reasons, Willoughby Tucker is the most complete, emotional and addictive Ethel Cain record to date.
