Style: dark rock/pop
Primary Emotions/Themes: the church, sin, hypocrisy
Thoughts: This is not my normal kind of music. Typically I shy away from poppier, more mainstream type music. There are however exceptions to everything. In this particular instance what Ethel has done on her debut album is create an atmosphere so dark and gloomy that it instantly caught my attention and kept it for the entirety of The Preacher's Daughter.
The music here is slow, reverb filled rock that has an obvious focus on Ethel's voice. The album has many different approaches. We have full on pop with American Teenager, slow and somber with Western Nights, almost dark ambient with Ptolemaea, and an incredible delve into the darkness of the human mind on August Underground.
The music tells a story as much as the lyrics do. The earlier songs are more cheerful and uplifting (even though they do have an underlying sadness to them). As the album progresses though the darkness begins to take hold and metastatic in the core of the music - growing like a cancer.
I don't know the last time I heard an album quite like this. It masquerades as a pop rock album, but the core of it is much much deeper than that. It's a story of someone losing their humanity, losing everything that binds them to what is good and decent in this world. In it's place we get the perverted version of the world and the shell that many of us become in life after we are subjected to these same aberrations.
Ethel hasn't just created a great pop album, she's created one of the most striking and emotional albums in my collection. The slow and somber songs mixed with her ethereal voice is enough to give me pause - something that is truly rare. Whatever she does next I hope that it maintains the quality of this release, and even if it doesn't we still have this testament to what pop music can be in the hands of the right individual.
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