Neoclassical — Music

Lingua Ignota’s latest remake of the 1987 Swans album Children of God is a quieter affair than followers may expect. Kristin Hayter hails from an active noise scene in Rhode Island which has until now provided her stylistic template—and an endless supply of abusive men to draw inspiration from. Sinner Get Ready swaps out screeching power electronics for restrained analogue instrumentation, giving further emphasis to Kristin Hayter’s intense vocals than ever before.

This proves a double-edged sword. The strength and vulnerability of Hayter’s performance shines brighter. The deficiencies of her repetitious lyrics become impossible to ignore. It sounds uncharitable, but Hayter is a one-trick pony; she uses religious iconography to explore the power dynamics of violence, abuse and revenge. This is interesting the first few times you hear it but very quickly feels hackneyed and overwrought.

Similar to Nick Cave’s compulsive invocation of Jesus, Hayter’s treatment of Christianity feels awkward and lazy, like a first-resort attempt to cram power into their work. Perhaps this exposes a bias in my own enjoyment of noise—but I can’t help feeling that a vital layer of abstraction and transcendence gets lost in all the structure and dogma. When Hayter was turning everything up to 11, it brushed the transcendence that lies within organised religion—the zenith of which can be found in the album Yirat Hashem, by an unknown artist. Quieten things even a little, and the whole illusion crumbles and feels like fool’s gold.

Sinner Get Ready is enjoying a rapturous reception but I can’t really figure out why. Lyrically and thematically it retreads the exact same ground as its predecessors—and instrumentally it is nowhere near as brave, unusual or arresting. Previous Lingua Ignota album CALIGUA was the body and the blood of Christ. Sinner Get Ready is some nice crackers and communion wine that got delivered to the church by Brakes.

Sinner Get Ready is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Sightless Pit are as close to a supergroup as their field will allow. Comprising Lee Buford (The Body), Kristin Hayter (LINGUA IGNOTA), and Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), the band have crafted a document of abjection and hopelessness which combines and solidifies their respective strengths. It comes at the tail of two years of on/off studio time during which the artists have tinkered, tweaked, recorded and assembled stems. The rarity with which they shared studio space is impossible to hear on this record—something cohesive, beautifully engineered and, in its own way, gratifyingly restrained.

The album’s ace-in-the-hole is Hayter—an industrial/noise artist who emerged and shot to relative stardom in a very short span of time, and represents the very best of what the genres can currently achieve. Her compositional input and staggering voice elevate the material on Grave of a Dog to operatic status; and its disruption and disentegration (such as at the end of ‘The Ocean of Mercy’) serve to pull the ear even more sympathetically to Buford and Walker’s glitchier, crunchier sound.

Buford’s influence is particularly notable: a relentless, mechanical heartbeat of distorted drums which pushes forward like a dynamo, inflates the album with pressure, and gives it brittle, burning life. But no one element is more valuable than the other here. It is an album which could only have been made by these three collaborators.

The material presented on Grave of a Dog is profoundly negative—but the accompanying experiential thrill tips it into something affirmational. Like a liberation through loss, this album reaches such extremity, and throws life into such stark relief, that everything feels much simpler under its shadow.

Grave of a Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe