Spectreview: Lingua Ignota – SINNER GET READY

Released: August 6, 2021

Experimental
(Singer-Songwriter)
(Theatrical??)
(Vocal??)

-FUCHSIA PINK-

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“No longer shall I wander
Ugliness my home
Loneliness my master
I bow to him alone”

Of all today’s musical visionaries, Kristin Hayter feels like the one most perfectly suited for this moment. Though her art is titanic in scope and laser-focused – on the juxtaposition between biblical power and its established patriarchal legacy that, thousands of years later, would contribute to her trauma – it’s stylistically absorbent and almost universally appreciable. It is extreme, but not how experimental art tends to rub against the grain. To anyone cheated of their vital selves, hers is a soothing righteousness that borders on escapism, yet like all great art it does this at an angle: finding the balance between urgent transmission and stone-etched missive, landing on imagery that hits the pressure points between the intellectual and the desperately real.

Her third record as Lingua Ignota forms a triptych with its predecessors, which similarly married the ugliness of mortal pain with the imperturbable nature of holy scripture. In fact, just like a real-life triptych, its ends bend inward to face each other; SINNER GET READY gets its title from the excoriating title track of All Bitches Die, a debut that introduced Lingua Ignota as a meteor burning impossibly hot, as if she were a cracked vessel barely holding in the untold pain of millions. Over the last few years (and across her other great work, the transitional CALIGULA) that palpable heat hasn’t quieted, but the cracks have healed to better hide it. The terrifying noise that once defined her appears only briefly, on the low end of the piano in “THE ORDER OF SPIRITUAL VIRGINS” and in the gut-wrenching pleas of “I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES.” What we find afterward is someone whose prayers have been answered: draped in pearlescent armor, bathed in rusty smoke, finally transformed in full by His grace. You can taste the irony like a cold marble on your tongue.

More so than her previous albums, SINNER GET READY is thrillingly grounded in a place and a time. Whereas All Bitches Die felt almost purely elemental (save for that pointed title track) and CALIGULA weighed vague allusions to the era of Holy Roman Empire, this record brings the Amish legacy of Pennsylvania into the fold. Hayter pulls many of her lyrics from Mennonite scripture and graces several of her tracks with banjo licks, church organ and Appalachian folk instrumentation; an old legend of a Dutch ironworker forms the basis for the magisterial “PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE,” while “PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA” uses the famed ghost town (and the fire still burning in the abandoned coal mines below it) as a sickeningly effective background for her pious exhortations. It’s not an education as much as a perfect inspiration for Hayter’s favored subjects, and the snippets of dialogue she peppers throughout drive the point home. Where Hayter originally spoke in terms of herself and the iniquitous world at large, there’s a specificity surfacing here – whether it’s in promiscuous televangelist Jimmy Swaggart or in the devout Walmart shopper misplacing her faith into those same swathes of ruddy clouds – that sharpens what was once a blunt, if massive, instrument.

Sharpening and tempering, that’s what’s going on here. SINNER GET READY is both more grandiose and more potently concentrated than any Lingua Ignota record, partly because of the harmonies and that organ, but also because it’s where the river ends in this story. Songs like “MANY HANDS” and “MAN IS LIKE A SPRING FLOWER” bear a cumulative power that’s both expected for and novel to this project, as if we’re witnessing the denouement of a three-act play. The later in particular is splendorous, pairing an unsightly, earthly chord progression and dissonant piano with an ascendant movement that builds with a tension that’s bitingly, almost cruelly, sexual. Over its seven minutes she reenacts the great weakness of man, the one that cast her into a hell from which (if the album’s final words are any indication) she is cursed to inhabit eternally.

This is where, if Hayter decided to hang up the Lingua Ignota project for good, it would make for an crushing ending almost perfectly circuitous with its beginning, as if she were the lone space cadet from Returnal destined to cycle endlessly through her torment. Time will tell. But regardless of its place in her oeuvre, SINNER GET READY is sumptuouslypaced and so comparably accessible that it’s the easiest entry point into her work. Nuanced, blistering, and haunting, it is essential.

Highly recommended for sweat under the brow and the collar.