 Day 10, Caligula by Lingua Ignota suggested first by Exit Timing and then more successfully by Franklin Distaltzweig. I appreciate that she'll give me a couple days of fun before coming to ruin my life again. My friend Garth texted me on Sunday night. I don't envy the fact that you have to talk about Caligula in a video. He knows what it means to write about this album having done so back in 2019 as part of his best of the year breakdown alongside a whole bunch of other works that Anthony Fantano used his considerable platform to promote. But the problem with talking about Caligula in this moment for me isn't the fact that I have to distill my feelings about this deeply personal and painful piece of art or that I have to navigate the horrific circumstances that led to it. It's that I haven't had time to digest those things in the first place. At this moment I am less than 12 hours removed from my subject. I sat in this spot covered my eyes and cranked up those speakers and then I just let Lingua Ignota's Caligula wash over me. And though it wasn't pleasant, it was the right way to do it. I cannot think of another album this atmospheric, this textural. Sitting here I felt transported. At one point I paused to make sure that the percussive sounds I was hearing were part of the music and not some appliance failing in this room. Afterwards I thought, well, never gonna listen to that again. And then 10 minutes later I bought tickets to see her perform in May. Then I listened to her first album, All Bitches Die. And her debut EP Let the Evil of His Own Lips Cover Him. Then her covers of Bad Boys, Kim, Jolene, I read interviews and essays. I spent like 10 minutes trying to figure out what the fuck a Markov chain is because apparently she used one to tie 10,000 pages of real world abuse and musical depictions of it as her MFA thesis titled Burn Everything Trust No One Kill Yourself. Because even if I didn't really enjoy it, even if I don't want to listen to it again, it sunk its hooks into me. And that's why I hate this being a hot take. Because I don't have time to know if all of these feelings I'm having right now are going to be with me in a day, let alone a month or four, by the time she takes the stage at Le Poisson Rouge, will I still be thinking about this music like this? Maybe it doesn't matter. Kristen Hader's stage name, Latin for Unknown Language, effectively describes her music. It mixes elements of industrial, classical, noise and extreme metal, as called out in her Wikipedia page as well as plenty of other things. But what does that mean? When you're blending such diverse styles, determining genre may as well be throwing darts at a moving target in the dark. Hader initially approached the project as a psychotic fugue and that's a pretty good distillation. But to be honest, it's mostly a dirge. Caligula sounds like a funeral being held in an abandoned factory full of machinery not even worth stripping for parts, and she's the one who's dead. There is so much pain here. Her clean vocals sung at the inflection point between chest and head voice, ready to break at the slightest tremor, transform into screams that seem to be literally shredding her vocal cords. The sounds come out like her body is rejecting them. And that's before we take into account what she is actually saying, though admittedly, the words often feel beside the point. Most tracks have only a handful of phrases repeated over and over again, and days of tears and mourning drops the pretense entirely using her voice as instrument only. And that's not to say that there's no meaning to be found or specific lines that really hit. When her screams leave the void and aim laser-like at the men who abused her, you feel it and hate it. Hate that she was put into the place where the only way that she could cope was by making this, by screaming at a world that doesn't believe women and didn't believe her. Maybe hate the fact that you love it, that you think the world is better for her pain being in it. Because if we strip away everything, isn't that what everyone who waves about the album is really saying? Isn't that what I'm saying? That's what I'm fucking saying. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my patrons. My mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow. I am the sword Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If not, oh well. If you want to see more, subscribe and also, like, suggest something that I'll do in three days. Awesome. Bye.