Review Summary: "I really wanna fuck the girl on the cover, I'm gonna keep pretending it's the vocalist."
Reviewing this 40+ minute EP,
All Bitches Die, by Lingua Ignota almost feels like a disservice to the artist herself. Graphic, untreated emotion is indescribably palpable on all four tracks. The artist is not trying to hide a bit of information from the listener as she screams into your ears deliberately. A quick trip to her website, or perhaps a cursory look at some interviews she has granted, also provides some context as to why this was created—it is essentially a form of expulsion after spending so much of her life being abused by her partners. Her art pieces are a way of taking the music of her abusers, letting it effervesce into a brand new beast, and spewing it back into the world as her own. From the depraved screeches of biblical phrases to the perturbing samples used in key segments of some tracks, Lingua Ignota crafts this in a way that doesn’t make it hard to grasp. You’re supposed to
get it, understand why it exists at all.
Someone on a site I would rather rise above than name outright tried to pin the label of “Bandcampnoise” on this entire album. It’s true that
All Bitches Die is not on Spotify, Google Play, or any streaming service other than Bandcamp at the time this review was originally published. However, the person who said that must have only listened to, at most, 60 seconds of material across all four songs. Some movements are bookended with agitated static layered with Lingua Ignota’s evil-yet-arresting singing voice. Between these, though, is where the most powerful music is orchestrated. Around the 10-minute mark of
Woe To All, there is a truly beautiful harmony coupled with an equally-poignant piano arrangement. The 7-minute mark of the titular track is no different; she begins a sequence of notes that shows off the immense capabilities of her vocal range. Moments like these, of course, pair up with vivid lyrics. “
He held me down to strip me bare/Said ‘Hell is real, I’ll take you there’” is just one example of a lyric that no one wants to hear under normal circumstances. You sit through it nonetheless. You are demanded to listen.
It is insulting to pick up the entirety of
All Bitches Die and drop it in a bin reserved for bedroom noise projects. Effortlessly, Lingua Ignota tears through holes in all of those boundaries. She shouts herself hoarse on phrases that sound as if they have spent years inside her body, fermenting, refusing to leave. They cannot pass like any other event in her life, so they must be forced back out the way they were administered. Still grounded in reality, yet becoming something unusual in the process. Even assigning a numerical score to this piece and ranking it among albums created by others does not feel healthy. Other musicians write music inspired by people they meet on the sidewalk, their respective government, short phrases said to them by close friends. Lingua Ignota instead makes a necessary decision to trill “
my rapist lay beside me” from the top of a foggy mountain alongside the souls of those abused and driven to harm.
In a culture of misogynistic lyrics and a male-dominated subgenre of noise and industrial music, Lingua Ignota makes an imperative album with
All Bitches Die. It orders people to listen and come out of it a new being. If the listener does not feel affected, then we can only assume the artist will feel an even stronger urge to convey her message, and I am certainly not the person to ask what the message is.
