The voice of Kristin Hayter is a conduit for extreme pain. Her music as Lingua Ignota channeled the violence and abuse that men inflicted on her, which she righteously directed back at them with incantatory singing, transcendent screams, and immaculate sound design. This mixture of performance art and composition recalls Diamanda Galás, whose grief-stricken music is similarly earnest, operatic, and immersed in electronics. Late last year, when Hayter announced that she was retiring the Lingua Ignota moniker because it was “excruciating to perform,” the decision echoed how Galás finds relief from her elegies under the guise of a bluesy cabaret act. Hayter takes a spiritually similar tact on her new album, Saved!, which courses with both religious awe and discomfort. It somehow only pulls us deeper into Hayter’s disturbing vision.
Ordained online as an actual minister, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter blends traditional Christian songs and original devotionals, incorporating gospel, blues, and bluegrass into a washed-out image of American folk custom. She makes her versions sound like aged field recordings without detracting from their genuine emotion—a feat of shapeshifting and supple technological manipulation. With producer Seth Manchester, she recorded these songs on a 4-track and warped the tapes by feeding them through broken cassette players, mangling them further by hand. The damaged finished product evokes found-footage horror films, enveloping us in a world that seems incidental but is actually aestheticized: artifice disfigured to resemble reality.
Hayter grew up Catholic, and she’s made music about a variety of Christian denominations. Her excellent 2021 record, Sinner Get Ready, used a delicate palette to explore faiths native to Pennsylvania’s backcountry, including the Mennonites and Amish. Saved! centers on the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement, a Protestant sect that encourages charismatic activities—among them glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Hayter’s settings journey into spare, tuneful terrain. She strips her toolkit down to an acoustic guitar, minimal percussion, and a piano hung with chains and bells, a treatment that draws attention to buzzing wire more than struck keys. The altered instrument plunks out a harsh, ominous sense of rhythmic consistency during an otherwise consonant 46 minutes.
Hayter seems to play characters—or, as she might describe it, people manifest in her performances. She indeed speaks in tongues, utterances that produce both discordant interludes and a roiling underlay to otherwise tuneful music. And Christianity’s musical heritage allows the past to speak through her. The credits neglect to acknowledge the specific songwriters and standards she imitates, such as 1920s blues legend Blind Willie Johnson on “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” and preacher Robert Lowry on “Nothing But the Blood.” It’s a curious decision, but also a provocative one that feels couched in a lineage of 20th century appropriative writers such as Kathy Acker—Hayter studied to be an experimental writer before she began Lingua Ignota. Her murky source material furthers the illusion that we’ve stumbled upon a cobwebbed and haunted talisman, some cursed keepsake of the penitent American soul.
Saved! has jarring moments and a general atmosphere of unease, but it nonetheless shows a more mellifluous side of Hayter. In place of dynamic shifts, drones, or distortion, the album is full of melody, harmony, and ecclesiastical warmth. Yet no matter how intensely Hayter praises Jesus, she sounds more earnest about the power of the hymnal tradition than her faith. She summoned Satan on 2019’s breakout Caligula, while on Sinner Get Ready, she treated God as though the deity itself was her abuser. Here, her perspective on religion is ambiguous, though the songs themselves are more inviting than ever.
Hayter has an uncommon sense of emotional control and precision: her words swoon, crack, whisper, and plead, but always with just the right amount of embellishment. The poetic original “I Will Be With You Always” builds from a coo into a terrified revelation: “On the night I was beset by demons/I know their names but cannot speak them.” She flexes her muscles as a different singer entirely on the shorter tracks. Hayter serves as her own, rousing accompanist on “I’m Getting Out While I Can,” while on the call-and-response acapella of “There Is Power in the Blood,” she dons a warbly head voice. Her shifts in tone feel like tiny character sketches. When she places a selection of Blind Willie Johnson’s lyrics to her own music on the haunting “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole,” her solemn phrasing imparts a damaged sense of need, a formidable echo of the narratives of abuse in her previous work.
Hayter closes out the LP with the 19th-century hymn, “How Can I Keep From Singing?” Her unadorned piano is a moving, lucid counterweight to the anguished texture of the preceding tracks, until the babble of glossolalia outlasts her dulcet melody. Hayter continues to traverse a biblical, deeply American landscape, surveying both its fire and brimstone and its transformative music. Saved! understands both of these qualities—consequently, rage, wonder, and beauty all churn just under its surface.
