BEST ALBUMS OF 2022 — DECEMBER
Finally, a little scary story to close this series. Thank you so much for reading.
Preacher’s Daughter came out in May 2022 and was on many critics’ mid-year Best Ofs. I listened to it with four days left in the year on the train headed to a job I would leave three months later, and curling up against the chill winds blowing down a train platform feels more suited to its themes than taking selfies on the beach. I cannot imagine how many people’s summer’s Ethel Cain started on the wrong note. I’m very glad I enjoyed such a wonderful year of music before she told me her story about religious abuse and cannibalism.
Horror is not a kind genre to women. The allure of “the final girl” revolves around her permanent prey state. She must barely evade the snapping jaws of the beast and the audience must sympathize like David Attenbourough is narrating every move: Here we see the heroine, the lone survivor of her party, doing her best against the oncoming threat. Through a mixture of cleverness and luck, she may yet find a way to safety. Otherwise, it’s not satisfying to see her succeed. Sometimes a Final Girl’s success is in taking vengeance against the forces that pushed her to the brink (aka the Carrie route), and while I’m always happy for those ladies, I recognize the value of their catharsis doesn’t supercede a certain number of casualties. The VVitch iterates on this formula by centering its story around a family whose daughter, Thomasin, is blamed for her baby brother’s disappearance via witches and the family’s subsequent misfortunes. Thomasin is a Final Girl who doesn’t overcome the witches’ hunt by her own power, rather they call it off and offer luxuries in exchange for her life. She chooses the devil-worshipping witch coven over more years within Puritan New England’s austerity because forgiving violence to secure safety is the bedrock of American Christianity.
America’s Evangelical Christianity is not the same religion that motivated the Puritans to flee England for Massachusetts. Its worst parts barely qualify as Christian at all. It’s not a faith based in love like it claims, but rather centers its devotion around constant fight-or-flight. Its stressors are familiar to anyone who has read through signs of a cult: opposition to critical thinking, threat of excommunication, black-and-white thinking. Many evangelical services take things a step further and work to entrench conservative propaganda under threat of existential punishment, forming a population who starts viewing lecherous figures like Donald Trump as messiahs just for having the right political affiliation. Growing up within such a community traumatizes anyone who falls outside their definition of what’s acceptable. Escaping its oppressive gaze often leads to better lives with the right support, but Preacher’s Daughter is not interested in that.
This album’s brutality would be called gratuitous in most formats. In film it would edge towards exploitation gonzo and as literature it would be companions with A Little Life. “Swinging by my neck from the family tree,” Ethel Cain groans in the album opener “Family Tree”, “He’ll laugh and say, ‘You know I raised you better than this’ / Then leave me hanging so they all can laugh at me” . The character she’s created knows nothing but pain and humiliation. She once dreamed of a nice life, but that hope died along with the boy she dreamed it with. She begins leading a nomadic life of seedy motels and roadside thrills, rotating men in and out of her bed with promises of cheap booze and an easy place between her legs, hanging onto them even when they hurt her because she lost the last man she let go. Her crushed dignity reforms around the service she can provide, her personhood sacrificed in service of entertainment, pleasure, and consumption. The guilt she feels spreads deep roots into her spirit thanks to the fertile soil left behind from years of church indoctrination. Heaven has abandoned her, so she embraces an outlaw’s life of sin instead.
Misery loves using trauma to justify its presence, but horror finds rare satisfaction in a straightforward downward spiral. There needs to be a supernatural threat that separates it from psychological drama á la Requiem For A Dream. In Preacher’s Daughter’s final, devastating tracks, Ethel Cain is killed and eaten by her final lover. Cain’s performance on “Ptolomaea” receives plenty of well-deserved attention, but I was interested in the droning groans of “August Underground” from the moment I saw it in the tracklist. Its namesake movie is an exploitation horror film infamous for its found footage style that made authorities believe that it was an actual snuff film. It follows a serial killer and his accomplice as they brutalize women physically and sexually, humiliating them through nudity, torture, and filth before discarding them. Ethel does not just meet her end at the hands of the road, she is torn apart by the jaws of a predator after abandoning everything she once knew. It’s the exact nightmare high control groups threaten people with to ensure obedience. They need their community to feel warm and familiar in comparison to quell dissent. The American right takes advantage of this and combines Evangelical Christianity and old-fashioned conspiracy theories to convince their populations the nooses around their neck are there for protection. It works time and time again because people in real life do not always possess a Final Girl’s determination to overcome the cruel unknown. Ethel’s prayers for safety, love, and a simple house in Nebraska were not good enough in the face of a broken spirit.
This isn’t a casual listen. Horror delights in destruction in order to reveal reality and Preacher’s Daughter’s does a damn good job of placing listeners deep within its agony. It’s a little crazy to drop this in May! This is a summer album in the same sense scary stories at 2am are summer stories, a kind of narrative you hear from a friend of a friend of a friend who knew someone from their high school who went missing one day. The details are hazy at first, but research reveals terrible depths that twist your stomach and ruin your day. I think the terror of living has left almost everyone with stories like that. Make sure you tell a loved one you appreciate them before it’s too late.