Sinner Get Ready

A compellingly strange album for a dark night of the soul….

Perhaps the best compliment I could give Kristin Hayter is that her music feels totally impossible to describe, unlike anything I’ve heard before. (Her older music is under the moniker Lingua Ignota; her latest album is under the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.) Her fourth studio album “SINNER GET READY” is dark avant-garde living somewhere amidst ancient sacred music, operatic classical music, and Appalachian folk. She truly uses her voice as its own instrument making sounds from the most gorgeously soaring to terrifyingly ugly. 

These musical choices perfectly echo her lyrical themes of suffering abuse and desperately seeking both spiritual redemption and revenge (“Glorious Father, intercede for me / if I cannot hide from you, neither can he”). This album brutally explores the dark implications of a powerful God in a world of suffering with lyrics like, “The surgeon’s precision is nothing / no wound as sharp as the will of God.” But there are also moments of hope, ending with the lyrics, “Paradise will be mine / no longer shall I wander / ugliness my home / loneliness my master / I bow to him alone.”

As Leonard Bernstein once said: “A work of art does not answer questions; it provokes them, and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”