Lingua Ignota, AKA Rhode Island musician Kristin Hayter, released one of 2018’s most startling and unfairly overlooked information in All Bitches Die. Written in the wake of domestic abuse, it was built via pics of horrific violence in the direction of Holy Is the Name, an eerily beautiful ballad that imaged her lying alongside her lifeless abuser, praising a scythe and awl. As a remaining picture, it changed into emphatic. Still, her second album broadcasts that any Hollywood narrative of overcoming trauma is a lie: abuse, she asserts, can linger for an entire life. “Life is cruel, and time heals nothing,” runs one bitter lyric.
Once again, Hayter draws from many inspirations to create a sledgehammer amalgam. On Do You Doubt Me, Traitor, she unleashes determined shrieks – “How do I spoil you before you smash me?” – until she hyperventilates, showing up a lot of the roaring you pay attention from black metallers as secure, pampered, and solid. But passages like this, or spells of huge noisy downforce that recollect Sunn O))), are offset with more spartan, stately strings-and-piano sections, evoking the comfort and clarity one experiences after a bout of vomiting. Hayter has spoken of her fascination with Roman Catholicism. There is a liturgical excellent to this latter fashion – she once in a while can provide her enunciated, discrete lyrics like a horrible benediction or like the fathers in The Exorcist telling Regan the electricity of Christ compels her.
Those lyrics are regularly so pertinent to the confusion that includes abuse. “Who will love you if I don’t? Who will fuck you if I gained’t?” she wonders, announcing her abuser as pathetic and pitying them to the point of nearly returning; by tilting the track May Failure Be Your Noose, she decides to wish them nothing, however unwell.
Hayter is classically skilled, and there is emotional and technical brilliance to how she expands her vocal palette right here – Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow! She sees her break up her voice aside like a throat singer while different sections consider the diffused ululations of conventional Gaelic track. Sadly, it sounds like her revenger’s tragedy isn’t always over; however, the survival – certainly flourishing – of her specific artistry is its very own triumph.
