Take up your cross and behold, the Reverend has arrived, miraculously, from her despairing ravine of pain and sorrow!
Following her harrowing SINNER GET READY, Lingua Ignota took a dip in the Mississippi and re-emerged, baptized anew. She's now the Reverend KristIn Michael Hayter, and on SAVED!, her first album under this new moniker, Hayter dawns upon us like an unsteady light. We are her hungered parishioners, diminutive in the palm of her hand, as she toes the line between the horrifying hell still burning within and a hope-feigning religious euphoria.
A body torn down and a spirit broken, to say Hayter has seen hell would be an understatement. But she's "getting out while she can," as she repeats in a tone bloated by lost time on album opener "I'M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN." She's escaping a "world full of sin" and stepping into a fresh and verdant life, though this newness eventually splits at the seams as the record progresses. Many might've thought Hayter would take a step back following the suffering she endured and escaped, but SAVED! suggests you can only keep an artist who feels so deeply down for so long. SAVED! is Hayter's fight for actualization and rebirth, as twisted as the results may often sound.
SAVED! recounts Hayter's personal exodus from darkness — she's scaled mountains and brought with her wood to rebuild her temple so that the Lord may see her in her journey toward healing. After all, there is "wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb"; at the very least, SAVED! sees Hayter try to find that wonder-working power for herself.
Hayter is a soul-searcher for whom the idea of God is still very much a possibility, though an ambiguous one. Now, more than ever, her intensive process of finding her version of salvation is intentionally unraveled, every detail exposed; SAVED! sees Hayter observe the Christian life and sinner's journey toward justification with a documentarian's eye while also seeking peace for herself. Sometimes, the music's pew-shaking grandeur can come across insincere or exaggerated, a mere accessory to what Hayter aims to convey. Is she touring the faith for only its aesthetic splendour? Then again, what overtly charismatic church leader or person looking for answers to life's questions isn't a tourist of faith? The Christian life, for many, is about faking all that you seek into existence.
Whether or not this search is of genuine desire or some gesture toward a gaudy ecclesiastic aesthetic, Hayter's most recent attempt at salvation manifests in arguably the most afflicted and disconcerting peak into her head and heart yet. Her vocals shudder and quake on "WAYFARING STRANGER," while her cries tell of years of pent-up suffering laid to the wayside far too long on the closing hymn, 'HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINNING.' These are intense expressions of suffering working in Hayter's favour, as they render her either a true witness to her saviour's deliverance or an impassioned dramatist fulfilling her elaborate vision.
In the past, Hayter described herself as a "self-loathing, semi-practicing catholic," but also conveyed adoration for the pageantry of worship, art, and music as worship. Her fascination has been stained by the systemic abuse and evils of organized religion, the darkness that can wear so many masks — this simultaneous fascination and disgust has been crucial to Hayter's art, and on SAVED!, she's blurred the lines through her attempt at "choosing Christ." She knows all the "right" songs, verses, phrases and how to demonstrate them in a "good Christian" manner. But even as her spoken tongues intensify as the record draws to a close, you can't quite discern what she believes or why she stands at the pulpit to preach salvation, which makes the record's spiritual catharsis ever the more mystifying. Hayter herself doesn't quite have the answers, but the quest is what drives the reverend to take up her cross with such fiery passion.
(Perpetual Flame Ministries )Following her harrowing SINNER GET READY, Lingua Ignota took a dip in the Mississippi and re-emerged, baptized anew. She's now the Reverend KristIn Michael Hayter, and on SAVED!, her first album under this new moniker, Hayter dawns upon us like an unsteady light. We are her hungered parishioners, diminutive in the palm of her hand, as she toes the line between the horrifying hell still burning within and a hope-feigning religious euphoria.
A body torn down and a spirit broken, to say Hayter has seen hell would be an understatement. But she's "getting out while she can," as she repeats in a tone bloated by lost time on album opener "I'M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN." She's escaping a "world full of sin" and stepping into a fresh and verdant life, though this newness eventually splits at the seams as the record progresses. Many might've thought Hayter would take a step back following the suffering she endured and escaped, but SAVED! suggests you can only keep an artist who feels so deeply down for so long. SAVED! is Hayter's fight for actualization and rebirth, as twisted as the results may often sound.
SAVED! recounts Hayter's personal exodus from darkness — she's scaled mountains and brought with her wood to rebuild her temple so that the Lord may see her in her journey toward healing. After all, there is "wonder-working power in the blood of the lamb"; at the very least, SAVED! sees Hayter try to find that wonder-working power for herself.
Hayter is a soul-searcher for whom the idea of God is still very much a possibility, though an ambiguous one. Now, more than ever, her intensive process of finding her version of salvation is intentionally unraveled, every detail exposed; SAVED! sees Hayter observe the Christian life and sinner's journey toward justification with a documentarian's eye while also seeking peace for herself. Sometimes, the music's pew-shaking grandeur can come across insincere or exaggerated, a mere accessory to what Hayter aims to convey. Is she touring the faith for only its aesthetic splendour? Then again, what overtly charismatic church leader or person looking for answers to life's questions isn't a tourist of faith? The Christian life, for many, is about faking all that you seek into existence.
Whether or not this search is of genuine desire or some gesture toward a gaudy ecclesiastic aesthetic, Hayter's most recent attempt at salvation manifests in arguably the most afflicted and disconcerting peak into her head and heart yet. Her vocals shudder and quake on "WAYFARING STRANGER," while her cries tell of years of pent-up suffering laid to the wayside far too long on the closing hymn, 'HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINNING.' These are intense expressions of suffering working in Hayter's favour, as they render her either a true witness to her saviour's deliverance or an impassioned dramatist fulfilling her elaborate vision.
In the past, Hayter described herself as a "self-loathing, semi-practicing catholic," but also conveyed adoration for the pageantry of worship, art, and music as worship. Her fascination has been stained by the systemic abuse and evils of organized religion, the darkness that can wear so many masks — this simultaneous fascination and disgust has been crucial to Hayter's art, and on SAVED!, she's blurred the lines through her attempt at "choosing Christ." She knows all the "right" songs, verses, phrases and how to demonstrate them in a "good Christian" manner. But even as her spoken tongues intensify as the record draws to a close, you can't quite discern what she believes or why she stands at the pulpit to preach salvation, which makes the record's spiritual catharsis ever the more mystifying. Hayter herself doesn't quite have the answers, but the quest is what drives the reverend to take up her cross with such fiery passion.