Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter performs at (Le) Poisson Rouge, January 26, 2024 (screenshot by me, from video filmed & edited by the Diamond Brothers)
At the end of January, I found salvation. In a stuffy concert venue basement. From an Internet-ordained reverend. But those details don’t make my newfound (ok, and temporary) deliverance by Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, formerly known as Lingua Ignota, any less meaningful. It was specifically her rendition of the hymn “Give Me Jesus” that did it, sung in her operatic upper register. With its trance-like repetitions, I was trying not to cry in the warm backwash of my hazy IPA while considering giving my life over to Christ.
Well, I didn’t.
But that isn’t a comment on the strength of her performance at (Le) Poisson Rouge, which I haven’t stopped thinking about since. The show was an intimate in-the-round solo act with Hayter’s astonishing classically trained voice at the fore. She was only accompanied by her piano, its strings draped with bells and chains, accouterments she ritualistically placed at the start of her performance while singing, off-mic, “The Christian Life” by Elvis’s favs the Louvin Brothers (“My buddies tell me that I should have waited. They say I’m missing a whole world of fun. But I am happy and I sing with pride, I like the Christian life!”). This inventive alteration of the piano, turning it into what it truly is—the intersection of string and percussion instrument, lent an eerie jangling dissonant tone as Hayter heralded the coming judgment day with songs from her 2023 Pentecostal doomsday album SAVED! interspersed with traditional hymns such as “Running for My Life,” “Satan Your Kingdom Must Fall Down,” and the aforementioned “Give Me Jesus.” If church was like this, I would attend every Sunday!
What continues to fascinate me about Hayter’s performance, part of the SAVED! tour she’ll be continuing through April (GO!), is her almost anthropological dedication to sifting through the archives of largely American Pentecostal Christian music to reach for some sort of non-denominational grace. Coupled with the subsequent February release of the Bandcamp exclusive album SAVED! The Index, a mad collection of feverish religious zeal—gospel, spiritual, blues, and country hymns, most dated to the 19th century if they can be dated at all—recorded in a fervent frenzy alongside SAVED!, Hayter emerges as one of the most thrilling musicians working right now.
The center around which these performances and the additional Index album revolve, SAVED! is a theoretically (and theologically) tight conceptual album that sounds like a mud-caked tape discovered in a field after a tent revival, wedged in the back of a bin at a thrift store, picked out of the dusty stacks at a library, or half-buried in the overgrown Guyana jungle at the former site of Jonestown. To put it more succinctly, SAVED! sounds found. This is as much related to the music itself as it is the production, done in collaboration with producer Seth Manchester. The sudden alarming blast of garbled vocals on the first track “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN,” one of the songs written by Hayter herself, announces this effect immediately. “I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN” weaves ominous premonitions of the apocalypse and the ecstatic ascension of those lucky believers including, of course, the singer herself: “Farewell to everyone that I know. Judgment is coming, I’m ready to go. I won’t stick around to see where you all stand. Just get out, get out, get out while you can!” See you, suckers! If strident lyrical visions of Revelations weren’t enough (imagery reflected later in the album with the demonic and/or angelic figure “heralded by seven trumpets” on “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS”), Hayter and Manchester used “half-broken cassette players” to create moments of panning, looping, rewinding, and flipping on and off. So much so that even though I know it’s coming I always wonder if I need to buy new headphones. And that’s before getting into the sudden shock of wailing bursts of speaking in tongues occurring throughout the album (and if you want more, the entire 13-and-a-half-minute last track on SAVED! The Index).
This sense of decay and deterioration works to augment the out-of-time quality of Reverend Hayter’s songs themselves. Like the (Le) Poisson Rouge performance, the album is a dynamic mix of Hayter’s originals such as the finger-pointing damnation of “ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL” and the collective absolution of “MAY THIS COMFORT AND PROTECT YOU,” gospel hymns like “PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND,” “POWER IN THE BLOOD,” and the full exhaustive version of “POOR WAYFARING STRANGER,” and some, in particular her adaptation of Blind Willie Johnson’s “I KNOW HIS BLOOD CAN MAKE ME WHOLE,” a combination of the two. While Diamanda Galás still maintains a clear vocal influence, Hayter notably leans into a more nasal delivery on SAVED!, especially on the covers. This recalls vintage country and folk recordings from groups like the Carter Family or the Louvin Brothers, whose implications of hellfire for the rest of those sinners on albums like Satan Is Real loom large here.
For those familiar with Hayter’s previous output as Lingua Ignota, these Christian obsessions, wielded in a way that’s both sacred and frightening, aren’t too much of a surprise or a departure. Yet, there are distinct differences. SAVED! lacks the wrenching guttural screams and fire-and-brimstone, self-and-other-flagellating Catholic wrath of 2018’s All Bitches Die and 2019’s CALIGULA. More recently with 2021’s SINNER GET READY, Ignota traded her more abrasive doom-laden metal elements on songs like “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR” (a future karaoke classic!) for a reverential aural landscape that is rich to the level of opulent with churchy organs and Appalachian folk instruments such as the dulcimer, remnants of her time living in the Pennsylvania Furnace of Central PA. In contrast, SAVED! sees Hayter pare down her accompaniment to the bells-and-chain-covered piano yet the album is anything but quiet. The clanging racket this prepared piano can make as heard in songs like “IDUMEA” is not to be underestimated. Otherwise, there is no percussion unless you count the ambient pitter-patter of rain at the beginning of “I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS,” which samples the track “TALK ABOUT SUFFERING HERE BELOW” from SAVED! The Index.
This sonic switch mirrors a thematic one. Lingua Ignota feels like music produced by a tortured saint bent on vengeance, wrapped up as it is in abuse, violence, and suffering (Hayter has been open about her experiences as a survivor). In particular, male abuse of power is no surprise in Ignota’s universe, as symbolized by the presence of fallen televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and his teary apology in “THE SACRED LINAMENT OF JUDGMENT” on SINNER GET READY. While Hayter’s music may not be any less bloody (SAVED! is blood-soaked in lyric and on the cover of the album), Christian themes are employed for something else: personal transcendence. This isn’t necessarily a heavenly choir of angels singing us into paradise though. Transcendence on SAVED! is Earth-bound and painful. Just take a listen to the final song on the album “HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING,” which overlays the quite sweet and solemn devotional hymn (“No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I’m clinging. Since Christ is Lord of Heaven and Earth, how can I keep from singing?”) with Hayter’s choking, gagging sobs and unhinged speaking in tongues. While, yes, the background cries are spookily reminiscent of the final Jonestown tape, there is a sense of catharsis and emotionally exhausted relief that comes across as wholly genuine. Notes from her own record label Perpetual Flame Ministries describes the album as “an earnest attempt to achieve salvation…” Well, goal attained!
It’s this earnestness that makes Hayter’s project so captivating. Even the glitchy call-and-response Howdy Doody cover “A BEAUTIFUL LIFE” on SAVED! The Index appears to be done without irony or as some sort of Pentecostal camp. Absent too is some tired form of morally obvious criticism of organized religion as seen in Catherine Opie’s wholly disappointing and terribly on-the-nose current exhibition Walls, Windows and Blood at Lehmann Maupin (You had near unlimited access to the Vatican City and you photographed CCTV cameras and bloody wounds in Italian paintings? Yawn!). In contrast, Hayter holds a clear and genuine reverence for these religious songs and their multitude of histories. For instance, while the actual origin of the song is unknown, it’s hard to hear “PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND” without thinking of Elvis’s and Mahalia Jackson’s two prominent renditions. Hayter takes these legacies with her and mines them for the possibility of grace contained within, even for those way, way outside any evangelical practice (as Hayter is herself).
Now, I don’t think you necessarily have to dig through the zealot archives to find musical transcendence. There are many other musicians doing it without the burden of religion. The Smile’s new album Wall of Eyes is straining towards some beyond, even if it is discovered in a Ballard/Cronenberg-ian car crash as on “Bending Hectic.” Cat Power’s performance of Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert at Carnegie Hall last week seemed to also pray to the altar of the almighty Zimmerman.
Yet, there is a not-insignificant crop of musicians who are lately attempting parallel religious reclamations to Hayter. For starters, I don’t think you can talk about contemporary musicians drawing on the history of American religiosity without bringing up Nick Cave (who also drags with him the dual influences of Elvis and Johnny Cash, each with their own religious albums). For the most part, Nick has stayed away from direct adaptations of traditional songs. There are notable exceptions, though, such as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ cover of the gospel “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” on 1986’s Kicking Against the Pricks and, similar to Hayter, the band’s own spin on Blind Willie Johnson’s “City of Refuge” on 1988’s Tender Prey. Yet aside from these few examples, Cave has been producing his own hymns for decades, trying to unravel the mysteries of Jesus Christ the Savior with songs steeped in Biblical imagery and the history of country, blues, and gospel music. Rather than penning yet another Nick Cave dissertation, I’ll just point to two of The Bad Seeds’ notable hymnals, 1997’s sacred and profane The Boatman’s Call and the peace and glory of 2019’s Ghosteen. However, even more than studio albums, the strongest connection between Hayter’s transcendental aims and Cave’s own comes via live performance, in particular Cave and Warren Ellis’s Carnage tour. As I wrote about previously (and take this essay as an extension of that), the Carnage performances came as close to actual tent revivals as I’ve ever seen from Nick. From the holy knee-drops of “Hand of God,” inspiring audience members to race up and down the aisles, to the repeated calls for “the kingdom in the sky,” I was ready to genuflect to the edge of the stage.
But, it’s not just Nick. There is FKA twigs’s blessed interpretation of Mary Magdalene as the sacred representation of female sexuality on MAGDALENE; Ethel Cain’s backwoods Southern Gothic narrative of firebrand preacher daddies, the suffering Christ, acceptance, and redemption on Preacher’s Daughter; and even Lana Del Rey has dipped her toe in with the heavenly “The Grants” on Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, not to mention the much-fan-loathed interlude with her raving pastor, “Judah Smith Interlude.” And, of course, though some might want to forget, there can’t be a discussion of sincerely employed Christian imagery in popular music without paying tribute to Kanye West who has mastered the form, from “Jesus Walks” and the cover of “I’ll Fly Away” on The College Dropout to his more recent Sunday Service-adjacent album, JESUS IS KING. It’s worth mentioning there is a corresponding impulse to employ art historical Christian iconography and tropes in contemporary visual art too (or at least the visual art to which I’m particularly drawn), including in Naudline Pierre’s illuminated winged creatures and Joseph Liatela’s BDSM reliquaries and lilies on the dance floor.
All of which raises the question: What’s with all of this? Particularly for those of us who grew up at a time when Marilyn Manson ripping up the Bible onstage while snarling “Antichrist Superstar” was the height of middle American rebellion, it’s a curious turn and one I don’t want to easily slot into some kind of Trad trend. Granted, there is a strain of “little-c” conservatism here with the ties to tradition and faith yet it’s cracked open for all kinds of wounded souls to find deliverance. And thank Christ. The recent overwrought Catholic handwringing and the (hilarious) Mass of Reparation held after trans and sex work activist Cecilia Gentili’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral shows we need many more possibilities for worship outside of organized religion. And Reverend Hayter certainly provides one, as she did at (Le) Poisson Rouge, playing to the heavens as the usually blasé New York concert-going audience stood in mostly quiet reverence. Maybe we could all just use a little saving.