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ALBUM REVIEW: SAVED! – Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter

KRISTIN HAYTER, the artist formerly known as LINGUA IGNOTA, first rose to prominence with her unflinching, harrowing albums under the moniker that dealt with abuse and trauma she had experienced. Recognising that could never be healthy in the long run, she has opted to lay LINGUA IGNOTA to rest with two final performances in London. Just a week later, her latest album, the first under her own reclaimed name is released to the world. REVEREND KRISTIN MICHAEL HAYTER is a very different exploration of her own art and mindset, with an earnest attempt at finding God and healing herself.

SAVED! is intrinsically designed to be challenging, its creation the result of its own piece of performance art. Recording to tape, without any digital manipulation, she and longtime collaborator Seth Manchester deliberately damaged, degraded, warped and manipulated the recordings to create something that feels like a desperate search for meaning and identity that’s often unsettling. That’s heightened by Hayter‘s use of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), moments sprinkled throughout the record and often distorted to further amplify their uneasiness. By drawing on charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, it’s often disorienting and jarring, but at no point is SAVED! anything less than a sincere search for salvation.

I’m Getting Out While I Can is a hell of an opener; tapes degrade almost in real time as Hayter‘s voice gets more urgent, as if resisting the sound of the music dying before a distorted moment of glossolalia. From there, amongst her own journey she sprinkles her own takes on hymns throughout. Both in keeping with her own search for meaning and a way of almost perverting the songs through intentionally degrading and debasing the recordings, it makes them more challenging and almost demanding they give up their sacred meaning or be further profaned. All My Friends Are Going To Hell gets a little close to the vocal melody of BLACK SABBATH‘s War Pigs, but the following There Is Power In the Blood swiftly rights the ship with its tainted gospel.

Hayter‘s own idiosyncratic voice is the powerhouse behind this far more stripped back album; Idumea is driven by layers of vocals that often veer off from harmonising with wails, while May This Comfort And Protect You feeds both it and the accompanying piano through several layers of degraded distortion. It comes across as yearning, but from a place of uneven footing, as if trying to seek that same comfort she wishes on others.

By the time eight-minute closer How Can I Keep From Singing comes around, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a simple piano ballad, but as ever, nothing it as it seems. In the background, Hayter rants and raves in tongues, crying, screaming and wailing – it’s so at odds with the peaceful piano and her soft voice, it’s perhaps the most difficult song to hear in how bare bones and uneasy it is.

SAVED! is undoubtedly a gospel album, but Hayter has twisted it into a new form that only she can, challenging both her own healing journey and those that hear it. Whether or not she found salvation through this process is almost immaterial; the search for meaning and safety is laid bare, an uneasy and despairing listen that might not discuss trauma any more but is still rooted in it.

Rating: 8/10

SAVED! - Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter

SAVED! is set for release on October 20th via Perpetual Flame Ministries.

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