Singer and multi-instrumentalist Kristin Hayter, who performs under the name Lingua Ignota, blends her affinities for spiritual inquiry and esoterica with heavy metal, opera, and electronica. Voicing the mystic’s yen for union with the absolute and the sinner’s syndromic addiction to gratification and remorse, Hayter’s visionary 2019 album Caligula is bathed in atmospheres that are at once disturbing and sublime. The album is no less than a testimony on “The Fall” described in the Bible and John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, and how, from the Christian viewpoint, the rupture between God and Satan has been the defining element of human history.
Like Caligula, Hayter’s follow-up, Sinner Get Ready, is musically eclectic and sees the so-called forces of good and evil as inextricably bound. The singer moves between various voices and identities throughout, often within the same verse. On “I Who Bend the Tall Grasses,” she moans, “Glorious father intercede for me/If I cannot hide from you,” inverting a passage in the Book of Genesis and, perhaps, alluding to John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Alternately deadpan and grief-stricken, Hayter could be portraying Adam, Eve, a demonic figure, Christ, or one of the thieves who languished beside him—or all of the above, an alternately integrated and schizoid persona. Similarly, the figure being addressed could be God or Satan.
Sinner Get Ready reiterates, though less emphatically, Caligula’s Buddhist-inflected assertion that suffering is part and parcel of human life. Undergirded by a welter of banjo, percussion, and minimal piano flourishes, “Repent Now Confess Now” is a lament for the human quandary: “This body is not your home…no wound as sharp as the will of God.” Elsewhere, “The Sacred Linament of Judgment” portrays a person torn between appetites and spiritual aspirations: “My soul has been bedecked with jewels/My broken heart too terrible to hold.”
More akin to a pastoral hymn than any song in her oeuvre, album closer “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata” finds Hayter pivoting toward a manic state (“All my pains are lifted…All my wounds are mended”), while still bemoaning, albeit ecstatically, her fundamental disconnection from a higher—or lower—power (“Loneliness my master”). We’re left to ponder whether this newfound clarity will in turn lead to another depressive crash or a more enduring wisdom. Caligula provided little hope for earthly reprieve, but Sinner Get Ready suggests, at least by its end, that it’s possible to experience moments of wholeness and existential respite.
Hayter has demonstrated throughout her career that she can pen an evocative confession and seductively deliver a melodic line. But her more essential talent is an ability to simultaneously embody and channel a range of psychological and spiritual states. Sinner Get Ready is driven by a penetrative imagination, a preternatural sense of empathy, and an innate awareness of the paradoxical nature of human existence.
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