release date: Aug. 6, 2021
format: digital (9 x File, FLAC)
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,62]
producer: Kristin Hayter
label: Sargent House - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 2. "I Who Bend the Tall Grasses" - 4. "Pennsylvania Furnance" (4 / 5) - 6. "The Sacres Linament of Judgement" - 7. "Perpetual Flame of Centralia" - 8. "Man Is Like a Spring Flower" - 9. "The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata"
4th studio album by Lingua Ignota (aka Kristin Hayter) following two years after Caligula (Jul. 2019) is once again with Hayter herself in multiple roles as technical staff, photographer, and producer. The album is partially made in collaboration with sound engineer and producer Seth Manchester, but otherwise it's exclusively Hayter as vocalist, instrumentalist, and composer. As Lingua Ignota she continues in the apocalyptic style with a less hard-hitting industrial tone than what characterised the predecessor, and instead there is room for a greater musical scope, which suits her expression. Additional stylistic features creep in from traditional folk, Americana, experimental music mixed with pervasive classical notes. On a first listen, it may sound a much like produced on the same thematic pot, but where she focused on Satan on her previous album, she now confronts God and blind believers. The lyrics revolve around Christian liturgy, sin, punishment, death, revenge, and to a lesser extent, the theme of forgiveness.
The album has generally been met by positive reviews, much like Caligula did. If you're not familiar with Lingua Ignota, it might be a bit of a frightening acquaintance at first with her obvious fascination for hard-hitting thrash metal and the death metal realm, but if you're able to stay in the intrusive brutal darkness, you may notice how other tones are present and open up. It's in the counterplay between the beauty and the ugly that Hayter moves confrontationally in and out of moods. Under the moniker of Lingua Ignota, Hayter released her debut album Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him via bandcamp.com in Feb. 2017, and already with the follow-up All Bitches Die (Jun. 2017) just five months later, she had become an international name. The album Caligula from 2019 is her first with a record company to back her up. She is trained in classical music, and stylistically, she skilfully mix elements from experimental popular music with classical music and thus has a natural kinship with Diamanda Galás. Both play with the brutal confrontation with Christian ideals in experimental classical processing. Here, you'll also find links to more recent neoclassical music such as Chelsea Wolfe and Swedish artist Anna von Hausswolff, who both experiment with a mix of popular music, and especially darkwave style, with classical compositions and furthermore exploit tensions between beauty and ugly. Hayter still sounds like no one else, because she is also an artist who seems more deeply rooted in alternative noise styles and more experimental approaches.
I can easily imagine Lingua Ignota as a highly original and fascinating artist, but focusing purely on the music product, her expression with strong bonds to a thrash metal and black metal scene then places Hayter in the periphery of what I basically understand works as good music.
However, Sinner Get Ready is Hayter's most nuanced and complex album and it's definitely worth to know.
Recommended.
[ bandcamp ]
