
Cobalt 60: If you go into the woods today you’re in for a radioactive surprise.
The return of the Pick Five format has us telling on ourselves, revealing some of our own apathies, and possibly taking some contentious positions as we talk about records which we haven’t got around to yet. We’re also talking about Ministry reformation news, and a video essay about goth and race making the rounds. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.
As always, love the show! But I’m going to try to convince you guys to take another look at Kristin Hayter’s post-Lingua Ignota work, especially since I first found her through IDUD. I’m not as into it musically as I was the earlier project, but I think you’re wrong to dismiss the Appalachian preacher thing as purely taking the piss. I can’t speak to Hayter’s actual religious beliefs, but I do think the album is meant to be taken sincerely, if not necessarily literally. Whereas in Lingua Ignota she leaned heavily on religious imagery as a threatening Old Testament god that was symbolic of her trauma, this album uses songs about salvation as a mark of growing past or through all of that.
I’m not saying there aren’t moments that are meant to be tongue in cheek, but that was present in even her darkest earlier work — Lars Ulrich sampled on Sorrow Sorrow Sorrow, for example. But at its core this album is as emotionally raw as anything else she’s done. It’s just focused on something else. Go back and listen to “May This Comfort and Protect You,” or especially “I Will Always Be With You” (keeping in mind the significance of the harpy-bitten tree, referenced in the first line, in Dante). This is some deep shit.
As always, we like what we like. And maybe it still doesn’t do anything for you. But it seemed to me that you were dismissing this album as sort of lightweight, and I think that’s unfair. Anyways, thanks for the great work through the years!
Jesus Christ Superstar was the first Laibach album I bought, because I’d heard Geburt Einer Nation and it was the one that the store had. The cover of The Cross is pretty good, there’s another track that I think is good but other than the title track it’s pretty skippable tbh