SAVED!

“But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven!”

Unearthing that which is buried within the music of Kristin Michael Hayter, daring to dig for meaning past the petrifying shrieks and enormous walls of church organs that scare off casual listeners, will divulge lyrical themes rooted in a contrasting mix of religious iconography and hellish trauma. Raised in an intensely Catholic household, Hayter spent many of her formative years trying to make sense of the religion she was brought up on amidst misogyny, eating disorders, and the violence she both witnessed firsthand and endured; eventually swearing off religion as a teenager. How could a God so faultless let so much malice into the world? Through her music under the Lingua Ignota pseudonym, she explored all facets of her being; the enigmatic dichotomy of good-versus-evil embedded within religious texts- which she has previously described herself as obsessed with- juxtaposed with song-writing that takes from her personal life. It’s a style that serves to help those previously subjected to similar trauma in coping, coined herself as “survivor anthems.” Inching every bit closer toward a spiritual re-awakening with each subsequent release, SAVED!, now shedding the Lingua Ignota handle in favor of attaching the prefix of reverend before her maiden name, a surname itself which follows the attainment of becoming an officially ordained minister, is a head-on journey into enlightenment. A collage of hymns yearning for salvation; reconnecting with religious roots and pleading desperately for her soul to be spared at the hour of reckoning. As Hayter states on her new record’s Bandcamp page, SAVED! is “an earnest attempt to achieve salvation through the tenets of charismatic Christianity.”

Hayter has stated the reason for abandoning the Lingy project was that the name felt suffocating; she had spent so much of her time as Lingua Ignota trying to wrestle the traumatic events of her past- only amplified following her horrific relationship with Daughters’ vocalist Alexis Marshall that spanned from 2019-2021 in which Marshall did a myriad of disgusting, abusive things which only furthered to strain Hayter mentally, someone who was previously an abuse survivor, including domestic abuse, rape, gaslighting, victim-blaming, and more- that it was time to leave it all behind and turn to a new page in her life. I can’t imagine performing the music of Lingua Ignota, music so deeply ingrained in experiences that are traumatic for Hayter, felt anything but reliving a past that she wanted to leave behind. The religious inclination of SAVED! feels as if Hayter is substituting locking her problems away and being forced to live with the lingering trauma of abuse with finding comfort in a newfound devotion to religion. Her knowledge of religion is certainly not surface-level; her years spent during her adolescence kneeling in Church pews, aphetically absorbing Preachers quoting the Gospels and singing songs of praise to a God she would later go on to denounce, and her tenure as a Church cantor, which served as the catalyst for her to begin vocal-training lessons, prove this. Furthermore, this the inclusion of many age-old religious classics which those who have spent as much time surrounded by the elaborate tapestries engraved into the stained-glass windows of Churches as Hayter are bound to be familiar with only cements this. The hymnals of Wayfaring Stranger and Power in the Blood are just two examples of the seven hymnals which are recontextualized and reinvented by Hayter.

Musically, SAVED! is both the natural next step in Hayter’s artistic trajectory as well as a bit of a departure from previous records. The Appalachian folk music that permeated and influenced Sinner Get Ready’s Avant-Folk soundscapes still manages to pervade bits of SAVED!, though now being spliced between short and barren yet oftentimes atmosphere-invoking acoustic hymnals like Precious Lord Take My Hand and Nothing But The Blood of Jesus which barely scrape a minute in length, Hayter takes a more singer-songwriter approach, imbued with many obvious Gospel undertones. SAVED!’s low-fidelity tape music-isms were achieved after Hayter ran the high-quality album-ready versions of each track through a 4-track recorder… and then again through multiple shitty cassette players. Yet these qualities give the record an indescribable yet immensely tangible beauty underneath the foggy, ethereal quality. The fuzzy recording quality and distorted record scratches and loops that randomly pop up on SAVED help the record maintain that feeling of being a lost recording which was recovered from an abandoned Church off a tape recorder that has remained untouched since the 1930s.

SAVED! is only dampened in moments where it feels like a track trails off before it can reach a rewarding climax. Lead single All My Friends Are Going To Hell’s sees Hayter rebuking the normalizing sinful tendencies within communities, making its members blind to their uncleanness, yet is spoiled by the fact that the track always feels as if it’s building to some grand finale that ties the track together yet never comes. May This Comfort and Protect You as well as a few of the abrupt, more cursory hymnals similarly feel underdeveloped. Though SAVED! is best experienced as a full experience rather than a piece where you take specific tracks and force them to stand on their own, something Hayter admitted prior to the record’s release, and these tracks do help contribute to SAVED!’s eerie, affecting aesthetic.

Playlist Adds: IDUMEA, I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS, PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND, THE POOR WAYFARING STRANGER, I KNOW HIS BLOOD CAN MAKE YOU WHOLE, HOW CAN I KEEP HER FROM SINGING
Worst Track: ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL
#46 of my Best of 2023: https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/chode/list/110828/chodes-best-of-2023/