Lingua Ignota - (2021) Sinner Get Ready CD

 

Sargent House – SH 252

The intensity and bleakness of Lingua Ignota’s fourth album was quite unlike any other released in 2021. SINNER GET READY immersed the listener in the blood and thunder of Pennsylvania’s rural Christianity, achieving genuinely unnerving heaviness via the medium of avant-classical hymnals and deconstructed Appalachian roots music. Pieces like I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES and MANY HANDS didn’t just channel the Biblical fury of peak Nick Cave or Diamanda Galas – they equalled them. Give yourself over to this record and you’ll find yourself thrust into an inferno of visceral weirdness and soul-quaking religious terror. 

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Following her titanic, devastating mesh of metal, opera and noise, Caligula, Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) retreated to the desolation of central Pennsylvania for her new album, Sinner Get Ready. Steering in the opposite direction of her previous work, Hayter embraced the isolation of her environment for a comparatively sparse, minimalist album that loses none of its emotional potency. The songwriter’s lyrics are dark and calamitous, foretelling hellish prophecies and painting brutal pictures almost as a form of worship, frequently recalling familiar religious icons in devotion. Sinner Get Ready thrives in these profound feelings, achieving something hauntingly beautiful.

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Kristin Hayter’s voice, stacked tall atop itself, holds you from a terrifying height. On her latest album as Lingua Ignota, she reckons with devotion and loneliness in rural Pennsylvania, using its spare landscape and its musical and religious history as the fertile backdrop for her work. Between Appalachian instruments and prepared piano, she sings like she’s on the cusp of physical collapse, running her voice ragged only for it to surge into a roar. The point where exhaustion snaps into adrenaline is her starting ground. From there, she traces the contours of human faith, gumming the jagged edges where it breaks.