album review: 'SINNER GET READY' by lingua ignota

So, I imagine that nobody is surprised this is getting a solo review.

Or maybe they are - hell, the last time I reviewed Lingua Ignota it wasn’t a solo review proper, it was shot from a hotel room in London while I was on vacation, and even then, I’d argue the album’s true resonance didn’t really materialize for me until the last few months of 2019 for very personal reasons. And that should not be surprising, because Caligula is a difficult album in every way. Beyond the fact that Kristin Hayter is such a raw and visceral presence as a vocalist, the subject matter surrounding abuse from both a partner and one’s self that can juxtapose the immediate and very human impact with the Biblical scope of the emotionality and the production was tough to take in and even more difficult to revisit… at least at first. In the last months of 2019, the best way I can describe my experience with Caligula was, on some level, therapeutic - without going into so much detail, the infusion of a distinctly Catholic aesthetic alongside its gut-churning rage tapped into something that gave me a space to contextualize and experience those emotions.

Now that’s not uncommon - hell, one can argue - and I have - that a certain emotional relatability is the foundation of our engagement with art. But when you get into experimental territory outside of the boundaries of song structure and conventional delivery or writing where the brutal directness is the point, it’s understandable if it can take some time to really resonate beyond sheer shock and awe, especially if you don’t have parallel experiences. It’s one reason that it feels distinctly weird and a little wrong to rate or rank albums in experimental spaces like this, because while craftsmanship and execution is important, providing a numerical grade to an experience where it either shocks but might not stick or cuts way too close to be adequately contextualized - or to a certain irony-deadened audience that feels nothing and just can’t get enough to telling everyone that - it feels inadequate. To paraphrase Dan Olsen’s review of Doug Walker’s The Wall, in my opinion it’s impossible to engage with certain stripes of transgressive, experimental art and Caligula specifically without leaving a lot of yourself on the table: what you fixate on, what you think is silly and why; it’s going to demand a level of emotional honesty to do it right, which is the big reason I felt that I had to split this into a solo review.

And it also got me thinking in a similar note to when I covered Jetty Bones earlier this year - I can’t expect or assume that SINNER GET READY wll have the same emotional or psychological gut punch that Caligula did at that time, especially a year-and-a-half removed from its most visceral impact for me with therapy and world-changing calamity around us. So even with the frankly insane amount of hype behind this, I was very cautious going into this album, especially knowing there was also a change in sound along the way, and a shift in focus to look more at religion, specifically a more intense evangelical stripe through the context of the United States… and yes, that tilts into American Catholicism as well, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And that meant I was gearing myself up for a pretty complicated and difficult listen, especially given that experimental art like this is not guaranteed to resonate within the context of a conventional album review…

But I will say this: having given SINNER GET READY plenty of listens, I feel like I’m in a unique position to discuss the album. In previous reviews - and extended memes - I’ve talked around my experience with religion and faith in comparison with the general hard atheistic perspective that seems to be expected by the internet at large. And while all of this is intensely personal and in most cases private, I feel it needs to exist as context for what I’m going to say about this album because I do feel my experience is unique and not really in alignment with what Lingua Ignota describes as her experience with religion… which might be why this album strikes an odd note for me. Not a bad one by any stretch, but one that will need to be explained.

So okay: I was raised very Catholic - altar server up until I graduated high school, my pastor was convinced I could go the seminary, and I also attended a Catholic school that had its own pastor with a rather notorious reputation for being extremely hard-line traditionalist and conservative. That pastor clashed rather starkly with the one I saw in my home parish, and if there was one person who kept me in the faith longer than anyone, it was that priest; for one he was intensely intellectually curious and he believed in showcasing the Bible and Catholic doctrine with a very modern and historically comprehensive point of view. He taught that the creation stories and Revelation were largely intended as metaphor in order to place them in context with real scientific fact that he adamantly supported, that the Bible was a historical text that evolved and changed through authors and revisions, that the Church’s history was spotty and corrupted when it took on political aims as it often did, and he would rail at length against fundamentalism and literal interpretations of texts. So when you have a priest who is as progressive as they come that my family deeply appreciated and who had been a part of my life for over a decade, opposite a cantankerous pastor who would literally recruit students to protest in front of abortion clinics and make headlines about their debate teams refusing to acknowledge the possibility of gay marriage - this was the mid-2000s in Canada - well, there would be tension. And it got even more complicated by the fact that I was a total nerd who listened to heavy metal and played Dungeons & Dragons while we had textbooks calling both gateways into Satanism - I may have surreptitiously sabotaged some of those textbooks - but funny thing, my parents got me the mature sourcebooks like The Book of Vile Darkness and The Book of Exalted Deeds, and while the graphic imagery often gets way more attention from both books, there’s also pretty extensive conversations about morality that varied wildly from what we were taught in religion classes. And by the time I got to my senior year I was researching Wicca and Satanism proper and realized not only just how much the Church had borrowed from paganism, but how they framed ethics and morality felt woefully inconsistent - and paired with a pretty strong teenage anarchist streak at the time, despite getting straight A’s and winning Athlete of the Year multiple times, I was still getting called into the principal’s office because of concerns of hanging ‘controversial’ texts in my locker.

And then I graduated and took philosophy courses in university and interacted with more folks outside of a straitlaced Catholic school, especially in goth and metal scenes, and I watched Kevin Smith’s Dogma way too many times as probably the best thing he’s ever made, and I did more reading and research and I came to view the Catholic Church in as much context as my young Canadian ass could muster: a woefully outdated and flawed institution that especially in modern times has done so much inexcusable harm, especially wrapped a dogma of infallibility that seems rather paltry when you find thousands of bodies of dead Indigenous kids under the residential schools they ran. And yet along the way, I can’t deny the power and resonance that faith can bring to people’s lives, regardless of its source point in Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster - in an absurd world run by incomprehensible systems to the average person, clinging to a higher power might give them the frail stability they need, especially when provided the progressive, forward-thinking historical context I had growing up that is way too rare and I dearly wish the Church actually embraced. I also can’t deny that the version of Jesus that was a mostly quiet, spiritual hippie who occasionally ate and drank with prostitutes and sinners and who was shown to care for the poor, sick, and disadvantaged more than anyone was a version of aspirational altruism that the institutions of religion have never really matched, starting with the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters which laid the Church’s political foundations. My point here is that I drifted from the Church, I didn’t have a violent exodus, which seems a lot more common if you’re grown up in an evangelical background… or, let’s say, down in the States for the past forty years.

And you can tell Lingua Ignota is framing a faith experience that is far closer to violence, albeit in a more layered way that spans dimensions physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. And setting is essential to explaining this framing: she moved to a town in rural Pennsylvania in recent years and draws many parallels to orders like The Cloisters of Ephrata, an isolated sect who based much of their devotion on fasting and celibacy in the 1700s - and I think it’s important to highlight what religion was in that era and setting. Keep in mind the Puritan settlers of that land left England during the Reformation to come to an openly hostile environment, with painfully limited resources and scarcity, where thoughts of the end of the world were never too far away - as common in times of great strife, see how the Book of Revelation was written - and while the Ephrata cloister weren’t specifically Calvinist, it’s hard not to see a certain brutality of that ideology slip into view: some were destined by God to go to Heaven, but original sin would ensure the majority never would, and you cannot earn a place unless you were chosen from on high. It’s an incredibly dour worldview all based around the assumed damnation and the self-denial of the scrupulous conscience, but in trying to survive in that era and place, they had to cling to it, and it’s not hard to see the parallel to rural communities today wracked with decay and isolation in systems beyond their control. And when you intersperse that with very human suffering where Lingua Ignota’s personal framing comes closer, like the abuse implied on ‘I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES’ or the terror of potentially being paralyzed on ‘REPENT NOW CONFESS NOW’, you get a taste of how visceral that devotion had to feel, where Hell and looming damnation is everywhere and while you hold your devotion, there will be many around you who do not. And the feminine subtext building off of Caligula is necessary to bring into focus, specifically in how sexual release clashes violently with these stripes of religion, but also how women were held to standards of purity to then be mercilessly exploited within those systems, not just in the primeval violence of ‘MANY HANDS’ but also in vocal snippets of disgraced American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who got caught with prostitutes and performed a public monologue of penance without ever actually saying what he did… who still has an audience to this day. So the rapacious, violent appetites of man are allowed to be satiated and forgiven, to still receive salvation… and if you are a woman who can remain ironclad in faith despite all of it, bathe in the blood of Christ that matches injuries inflicted upon you, feel like despite all of it you have salvation… well, it short-circuits reason. You are blessed, you are saved, you can walk into church in the middle of a pandemic and remain safe, and it shows in a proud, individualized American society - a corruption of the homespun communal elements of the Ephrata Cloister - paradise will be yours, and the rest can hang or burn.

Fucking Christ… no, literally, that is what I said aloud after fully sitting with these observations, and while I appreciate that little heresy, let’s unpack this. It goes without saying that Lingua Ignota is a singular force on this record, to sell this turmoil and make it feel outright Biblical. And as such, she did pivot away from the explosive noise and harrowing distortion of Caligula - hints of drone and synth on the opening track provide a transition to get to this point, which makes sense for someone seeking the balm of ascetic chastity given the abuse described on that album, but that’s about the last of what we get in that territory. And that’s a pretty significant change - the album is far less noisy and cacophonous and overwhelming in its distorted shrieks, which only come through on a few songs and are all the more haunting in their absence. Instead she opts for something more spare and expansive, drawing on neofolk and medieval mass music to go along with fractured samples that I previously mentioned, which centers Lingua Ignota and her multi-tracked but rough choral vocals surrounding her. And I do appreciate this choice: this was an album that could have gone for symphonic bombast and in chunks it would absolutely fit… but instead she opted for a sound that was more ramshackle and fractured to reinforce that haunted, rural vibe which draws the parallel from both centuries to… well, now. It’s not like apocalyptic messaging and Calvinist subtext has left the modern Evangelical movement, and the rampant systemic hypocrisy hasn’t gone away either. And the rational mind does not confront this intensity well - what I appreciate that Lingua Ignota delivers across even some of the more tuneful moments here is that there are moments where spiritual ecstasy is found, where you might even get why someone would be drawn to its majesty… but my God, at what cost? And that might be the most quietly unsettling part of all of this, even amidst the guttural screams across ‘I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES’ or the utterly visceral imagery or the systemic abuses, there’ll be those underfoot who’ll cling to their devotions, and even if they’re in a rotten place with heaps of dead around them, they will not bend, even in the face of a need to save others.

And it kind of goes without saying now that this isn’t really how I engage with religion or my faith. Some of this is absolutely cultural - I’ve always been a city guy, and Canada doesn’t really have much in the way of Evangelicalism, where even provinces like Quebec and recently Alberta that have more pronounced religion it’s more political and lacks that spiritual fervor - but I also don’t have that bleak, fundamentalist viewpoint of any God, let alone one with as much crushingly dark implications as what we often see south of the border. It’s not that I don’t get the power of this imagery and poetry - from a literary standpoint or just being immersed in how much art was spun from it, I absolutely get it, but it doesn’t trigger that gut-level sense of dark reckoning that I can imagine friends who grew up in more Evangelical backgrounds will feel with this album. Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate how viscerally beautiful and striking so many moments on this album are - the solemn organ and fragile bells providing implacable foundation to the grief and rage of ‘I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES’, the strings and jagged guitar on the cusp of snapping on ‘MANY HANDS’, the plucky swells and ominous distorted crescendo of ‘MAN IS LIKE A SPRING FLOWER’ even the more conventional melodies of ‘PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE’, ‘PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA’ and ‘THE SOLITARY BRETHREN OF EPHRATA’ - but some of the potency of this album is at a distance for me, and I think some of it comes with having that wild-eyed fundamentalism never as a serious presence in my life. And again, that’s not saying I don’t respect it, or that Lingua Ignota couldn’t create an atmosphere that makes it feel real, because she absolutely does… but like I said early on, something this extended and visceral and targeted may not always resonate on that gut level. And as a critic that’s frustrating, especially with as much acclaim has piled up for this album, but when I think about the layers of trauma this album peels through, I think I wound up with a blessing here.

And at the end of all of this, how do you grade an album like this? It’s not one I can easily recommend, especially given how its subject matter could literally be triggering to a certain audience, and while this is less immediately terrifying than Caligula, it’s still a deeply unsettling listen that I’m not even sure provides the same level of catharsis, especially with the bleakness of its implications by the ending. In other words, a much harder listen, and given very different circumstances, I’m not sure it’s one that’ll pull me back in the same way, even if I can absolutely appreciate and respect what it’s doing. So no, at least for me this isn’t “better” than Caligula, for as much as anyone cares about that comparison, but there’s still so much texture, power and potency here that I’m giving this a light 8/10. Again, not an album I can easily recommend, but in terms of looking a very specific brand of religion in the face and holding its bloody annals aloft, it’s absolutely worth hearing. I just hope that by the end, peace was found.