“On judgement day, do you know where you’ll stand?“
SAVED! is the newest album by Kristin Hayter, and the first since retiring Lingua Ignota, the former project being too rooted in reliving experiences of personal pain and trauma for her to continue. Instead, as we are told in an accompanying statement of intent, this album is produced under the new title of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, with long-time collaborator Seth Manchester, and wants to explore the “complex, sometimes ugly, always non-linear process of healing,” thereby based less on the pain of the past and more on the redemption and deliverance of the present and future. Though, if I were in a confessional myself, I’d have to admit, I don’t find this claim reaching its full ends.
Don’t let my potential apostasy mislead you, SAVED! certainly has its distinctions from the music Hayter released as Lingua Ignota, and anyone venturing into the album expecting something similar to Sinner Get Ready (2021), Caligula (2019), or All Bitches Die (2018) may well find themselves missing the elegant, sanguine production, the ominous radio chatter interspersed into tracks, and Hayter’s wrathful and defiant singing style, all replaced by tracks mostly backed only by piano and the occasional speaking-in-tongues, sometimes put through layers of cassette degradation in the style of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (2002). Though, whilst the wrath is absent, there are still powerful and mournful dirges to God sung so sweetly, sadly, and slowly to seep into your heart.
The tracks alternate between such ethereal dirges, and almost folksy, campfire renditions of American gospel classics. Indeed, perhaps the strongest signal that this album is not nearly such a personal work as any of her former is the fact that the majority of the tracks are not original compositions, but instead covers of existing, sometimes centuries-old hymns and gospel songs, largely from the American revivalist or Scared Harp tradition.
Of course, they all in some way or another have Hayter’s personal touch upon them: some of these covers of gospel tunes like “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole”, “How Can I Keep From Singing” and “The Poor Wayfaring Stranger” are rendered in that slow, mournful manner that Hayter is a true saint of. I was curious when I saw that it featured my favourite hymn, not just from the Sacred Harp tradition, but possibly of all Christian music, “Idumea” (sometimes also known as “And Am I Born To Die”), and I was brought to rapturous delight at how Hayter brings all the album’s best tricks into play for it. Her powerful voice is amplified by the choral overdubbing and the resounding piano, all perfectly distorted by the baptism in the waters of the spooling cassette reel.
Even these can’t escape my creeping suspicions that conflict with the album’s statement of intent. Whilst they are beautiful covers and renditions, they unavoidably feel less personal, and sometimes that’s almost the very point of the songs themselves. I don’t just mean the lyrics, which, rather than discussing the self, face outwards, discussing God, or, in one case, the sins of friends. Because this lesser sense of self comes across in composition and intent as well, originally composed as they were as revivalist missionary or gospel and choral works.
Perhaps something could be said about the meaning of how Hayter uses overdubbing to emulate the voices of what should be the faithful flock of many with just her own voice, how she acts as a congregation of one, in a personal relationship with God; but I find that idea at odds with the songs themselves having been sung by hundreds of thousands of others over decades. Instead, it weaves a connection from her faith to that of the history of the American revivalist and Christian movement. Not only are the songs old Sacred Harp gospels, sung by the faithful for over a century or more, the production method itself swells with nostalgia and historicity. The use of cassette distortion recalls Basinski and The Caretaker to mind, musicians who entwine their work with the very essence of the past fading gradually to the grave and being eternally reborn.
What so strongly came to me was how communal, rather than personal, these songs felt. “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “There is Power in the Blood” in particular bring that feeling about, both sung in this album in a campfire, Appalachian folk manner, sometimes even overdubbed to give the signature call-and-response such a format expects. Thus, seemingly devoid of that personal pathos that is so essential to Hayter’s other work. If these lack pathos from the personal, they could instead take it from the communal and historical. The former song was a hymn requested in the final words of Martin Luther King Jr. before his murder, and the latter was recomposed and its tune perhaps better known as “There is Power in the Union” by Joe Hill, an activist who was executed two years after doing so. Undoubtedly there is power, there is blood, in this music. It is not just Hayter’s own anymore, but of all the flock, whomever you count that as.
Where the album does look forward to the future, it finds uncertainty, perhaps as no one who can know the mind and will of God could otherwise. In the few original compositions of the album, namely “I’m Getting Out While I Can“, “All My Friends Are Going To Hell”, and “I Will Always Be With You” (with God’s presence being confused for that of a demon in the lyrics of the last), the constant theme is not so much relief in God’s love, but in fear and doubt of its existence. Gone from this album is the vengeful demand of God’s wrath upon sinners, but in these tracks it is replaced less by his love and more by the anxiety of his judgement and the uncertainty of his grace.
One of the reasons “Idumea” has been my favourite hymn is its direct confrontation with this anxiety, asking if beyond the veil of death we face “eternal happiness or woe,” and the rendition in this album is no exception. Maybe we can only reassure ourselves of God’s grace when we look to each other, or to the past. Left alone, Hayter can only speak-in-tongues, with no-one else to interpret the omens from the noise, and none but the cassette to hear.
Without a doubt, this is a fascinating record that all of her past fans will enjoy. Even though I’m happy she’s been able to move on from work she finds painful to produce as Lingua Ignota, I still couldn’t help feeling something was missing from SAVED!. I suppose that if these were truly intended as revelations from a spiritual rebirth, I wanted something more personal than primarily covers with layers of cassette maintaining distance between me from Hayter. If instead these were meditations on the connections faith must make through each other to live, I wanted them to have more polyphony or instrumentation than the lonely chorus of one voice and one slow piano.
Maybe, as a faithless wanderer, I’m missing something myself. After all, when you fall below the baptismal waters, in that moment before rebirth, you are meant to be all alone, save only for God, and the meaning in his gaze is something we can never know.
7/10
SAVED! releases on the 20th October, and can be pre-ordered here (US/EU).