Spectreview: LINGUA IGNOTA – CALIGULA

-PEARL-

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“My friends all wear your colors
Your flag flies above every door
But bitch, I smell you bleeding
And I know where you sleep”

How much music written today honestly, truly, captures the insanity of its time? America in 2019 is a cyst freshly popped, decades of corruption and poison rising to the surface like so much pus and bacteria, there for us all to witness and offer comment. It’s easy for this incessant stream of unearthed bile to leave us desensitized, but artists like Lingua Ignota are somehow finding ways to break through our thick callouses. Lingua Ignota is Kristen Hayter, a Rhode Island-based experimental artist that chooses to base her art around her personal trauma (having been abused for years by a notable noise musician), and in doing so provides an extraordinarily visceral window into the psychological horrors of abuse. Her music is based in both grandiose beauty and industrial abrasion, her classically-trained voice capable of nimble arpeggiation, mellifluous harmony and breathtaking screams, the kind borne of irrefutable pain. 2017’s ALL BITCHES DIE captivated listeners with its sheer force, as she swung exhilaratingly between between stillness and terror, but while that record flew under the radar for many, CALIGULA might finally be her well-deserved breakthrough, a record that takes the themes and sounds she’s known for and brings them to a imperial head. It’s longer and heavier in a way that might contribute to listener fatigue more than her previous works, but to some, more music of this caliber is nothing but a good thing.

Relative to her last album, CALIGULA flips almost completely from self-immolation to a vengeful wrath so white-hot it demands a biblical vocabulary. The cover art says it all: where Hayter was once portrayed painted and weeping in anguish on ALL BITCHES DIE, she assesses the camera lens coolly here, her body regally decked in jewelry, her neck and lips touched with gold in a way that infers an alchemical transformation of her past scars. Its focus is monomaniacal, pulling the listener into the rattled mind of an abuse survivor and flooding them in a seemingly bottomless well of indignation and internalized scorn. The shoe falls on second track “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR,” a unbelievably gorgeous song that minces no words in tearing to shreds those that question the veracity of her abuse. Soft piano and timpani keeps your guard lowered, until Hayter gradually ramps her vocals from low post-sob uttering to horrifying, blistering screams, like an prey animal backed into a corner. The softness descends into a nightmare scape of irreconcilable anguish that settles into the thrumming beat of distorted bass, like a faint headache after a bout of crying, as Hayter regains her poise and sentences her tormentor to death via imperially-layered harmonies. It’s brilliantly composed and operatic in scope, and nothing I’ve heard this year compares to it.

Hayter’s music seems to be sonically based in punishing post-rock workouts from bands like Swans, ironic in that Hayter’s lyrics are laser-focused on wayward monsters like Michael Gira, men that are blissfully unaware of the patriarchal environment they thrive in. Every second of its 66-minute runtime is racked with tension, as sparse piano and plucked strings threaten to break into piercing distortion and floor-shaking low frequencies. In this way, even wholly calm tracks like “FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWERED CROWN” and “FUCKING DEATHDEALER” have a heightened sense of anxiety surrounding them on first listen. Hayter has the ability to use both grand flourishes of raw force (like the explosive unveiling of her wrath’s source on closing track “I AM THE BEAST”) and tiny details (the bottle that clinks continuously in the album’s background until it finally gets smashed on “SORROW! SORROW! SORROW!”) in equally powerful measure. Awe-inspiring in its extremeness and just as devastating, CALIGULA captures the mental state of an abuse survivor better than almost any music available today, and while that doesn’t make it a fun listen, it does make it an extremely important one. The tragedy is knowing what Hayter went through to get to this point, and while the album rivals few in its capacity to convert the bull-headed, one bitterly wishes it needn’t have to be made at all.

Highly recommended.