I feel a constant urge to consume Perverts repeatedly until it is embedded within me. Perhaps it’s an exorcism of sorts. In response to an ask about how she felt after the album release, Ethel Cain replied: “like i’m ready to be happy again.” Or, perhaps it is an endless pull towards the content and aural soundscapes Cain has created, constantly trying to answer the questions she asks: “do you feel shame in your pleasure or do you revel in it. do you know the line between right and wrong and do you know what side of it you're on?”
“Perverts,” the album opener, is trance-like. Following a cover of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” that evokes the haunted quality of an old recording, we journey into a bleak aural landscape made by droning sounds and occasional bell-like tolls. Reflective of its title, it is an unsettling yet gentle descent into perversion and the rest of the album.
“Punish” tells the story of “a pedophile who was shot by the child’s father and now lives in exile where he physically maims himself to simulate the bullet wound in order to punish himself.” “I am punished by love,” Cain croons again and again, desperately soft. The rhythm is soothing, like a balm, corroborated by the airy treble of Cain’s voice. Even the deluded perversions of the character she sings from (“Only God would believe/That I was an angel/But they made me leave”) sound impossibly tender. Cain’s soft melody allows us to feel impossibly comfortable in this moment of horrifying and violent perversion.
“Housofpsychoticwomn” begins with droning noises against a soft melody. There is a sound churning louder and louder like you are spinning around to the point of throwing up, that sharp whipping sensation put into music. There is also the repeated, obsessive drive of “I love you” over and over, as if neither listener nor speaker could escape this punishment called love. I love the distorted voice amidst the droning that makes love feel bastardized, a perversion of what it should be but what it is nonetheless. I felt that I was physically expelling something from my body listening to this, like Cain had collapsed the line between listener and singer.
“Vacillator” (meaning someone who is indecisive, usually from fear) has impossibly soft drums, a reprieve from the earlier tracks. Cain’s voice hinges on a whisper at times, almost indifferent despite the erotic intensity of her lyrics (“When you’re clawing at the edge without escape/Do you like that, baby?”). The apathetic vocals contrast the described sensuality, audibly rejecting fulfillment. Traversing monotonously between extreme gratification and rejection, we are left with a spoken denial: “If you love me, keep it to yourself.”
“Onanist” (meaning masturbator) opens with haunting piano and Cain’s high, ethereal vocals. A gritty guitar blooms into the track, drowning everything out before giving way to silence. “It feels… good,” Cain murmurs tentatively as if the words are trembling in the empty air they are spoken into. The repetition of “it feels good” is both delusion and reassurance for me, a desperate hope that this “love” via endless self-gratification can be enough. Perversion through onanism “feels good” and decidedly un-good, shameful, and wrong. But the wrongness feeds into the pleasure: pleasure in perversion and perversion in pleasure.
In “Pulldrone,” Cain describes attempts to touch God and never quite getting there. Inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, a copy without an original, the simulacrum becomes a mark of Cain’s endless, futile search for the divine.
“I will dislocate my jaw to fit it all in,” she says in her desire for the divine, evoking a desperate hunger to the point of self-destruction. The destruction itself becomes a point of ascension, mixing gratification with violence, the divine with pain. Listening to the song feels spiritual and ascendant, traversing a hypnotic whirlpool of sound floating along Cain’s ouroboros. Perhaps the experience of this song is reflective of how I feel about the album as a whole: I can gorge on it endlessly again and again, reveling in my unraveling.
“Etienne” and “Thatorchia” are the album’s instrumental tracks. “Etienne,” mellow and soothing, feels like taking a deep breath and realizing that for the first time in a while, your lungs are full again. The spoken outro describes a man who runs to kill himself but finds survival in it instead. In “Etienne,” Killing oneself becomes a gritty yet gently narrated act of self-revival, the repetition an act of salvation. The second instrumental, “Thatorchia,” opens with a sharp, semi-metallic creaking that is hollow in its reverberation, both unsettling and comforting. Airy layered vocals build amidst a buzzing guitar, creating an aural (and embodied, for me) feeling of ascension with the swelling and the repeating rising melody.
“Amber Waves,” the final song, sonically feels like it is in a better place than “Perverts.” The sound is mellow, like the narrator is riding soft waves out to something better. However, Cain sings about the ruination of addiction. She murmurs again and again, “Me and my amber waves/I’ll be alright,” a hypnotic, delusional reassurance. Here, pleasure and addiction are a soft numbing trance to ride out into nothingness, the last of Cain’s failed attempts to touch the divine. Still, I can’t quite shake the hope that “Amber Waves” will take me somewhere better. But the guitar slowly slips away, and the album ends: “I can’t feel anything.”
"perverts was a sandbox to really do whatever i wanted so i just did whatever felt good," wrote Cain. Like the narrator in “Onanist,” her words embody the theme of trying to feel so good you experience the divine, which I find myself constantly reliving as I listen to Perverts again and again. I guess I am stuck in Cain’s hellscape of perversion, trying to touch something higher and maybe, just maybe, glimpsing it.
Pen Fang is a freshman in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at pfang@cornellsun.com.
