Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter – SAVED! Review

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Label: Perpetual Flame Ministries  USA  
Genre:  Devotional / Country / Noise
Release Date:  20-10-2023

Kristin Hayter released a string of harrowing albums under the name of Lingua Ignota between 2017 and 2021. These were abrasive works dealing with the pain of her lived experience with relational abuse and crossed a lot of avant-garde territory involving Noise, Classical Music and Americana. The last one of these genres was becoming increasingly prevalent in her works and her new album takes a step further in this direction. As stated in the promotional text, Hayter‘s name change to Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter is about switching focus toward healing rather than pain, and supplies ample reason for that change even if the music is a stone’s throw away from the Lingua Ingnota project. Still, as intensely personal and hard to critique as Hayter‘s works always are, I do always look forward to hearing what she does next. SAVED! is an interesting beast on its own. The album is, simply put, a work of Devotional Gospel music mixed with elements of Country and Noise. Instrumentally, things are as crisp as usual, with some acoustic instruments, piano and a harpsichord, if my ears are not deceiving me. All of this has been put down to tapes and physically distorted in different ways to give the album a cryptic feel, like having stumbled on something very private or secret. Most of SAVED! centers around Hayter’s voice, which is varied and strong in tone as always. Some obvious remnants of the Lingua Ignota sound can be heard in “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS” but most of the album does indeed display a different intent.

This is clear in the aforementioned song, as a distorted signal hovers just below the music and makes it more unnerving. A lot of the songs proceed like this with something straight being played at the same time as a subtle darkness creeps in. “IDUMEA” has a piano melody that comes straight out of the Trent Reznor playbook while the undulating bass makes it sound like a sermon being carried out in a basement boiler room. Even more intriguing, there are two songs that are basically Grindcore-length Country songs (“PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND”, “NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD OF JESUS”) that sound like snarky, almost aggressive subversions of the genre. At times, SAVED! comes close to sounding like it is created with the intent of producing a traditional work in its respective genres, but the real intent of these songs is displayed with the noise elements that creep in. Opener “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN” features distortions of the entire song, that sounds like someone is annoyingly playing around with the volume knob. When it instead sounds like a tape that has been damaged, the idea is clear, but the overall impact of it misses the mark. As does the mumbling that shows up here and there in the songs. Hayter will be singing something straight and in the background you can hear different recordings of her mumbling desperately. The idea is probably to display an underlying insanity but it sadly comes across sounding like the Chacarron Macarron Batman-meme, most egregiously in “HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING”. Ultimately, SAVED! feels like a fresh direction for Kristin Hayter that needs a bit more work. It is subtle and surprisingly intricate, but the ideas do not have enough flow and attention to how they are paced to come together as well as they could.

Rating: 6/10

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