We are revisiting some of our favourite albums of 2023

“All of my friends are going to hell / none of them know from what I can tell,” she sings with desperate certainty on the second track, which starts with the same melody and religious fervor as Black Sabbath’s hit song, “War Pigs.” “I’m getting up from the place where I fell / Lord, please forgive me / I don’t want to be like my friends who are going to hell.” The whole record plays like a soundtrack to a horror movie, always unsettling, even with the mentions of God’s love and goodness, which is sometimes backed by people wailing and babbling in “tongues,” so that even the most well-intentioned comforting is unsettled by religious fervor and otherworldly grimness.

“I want to sing salvation’s story / in concert with the blood-washed band.” Hayter presents a picture of Christianity, propagated in many of the most fervent American churches through the centuries, (but perhaps less so today,) where the “chosen” are only distinguished from the “lost,” by the act of being bathed in blood: horrific and apocalyptic imagery, to be sure.

Hayter has always dealt in grim imagery and apocalyptic themes, however. And where she sings under her last project, Lingua Ignota, (a reference to the polymath abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s “Unknown Language,”) “Satan get beside me / Satan fortify me,” her presentation of being “saved” is just as grim and disturbing, though the hope is felt in many of the songs, and her allegiances have perhaps changed towards the good. Considering the state of the world, with war and famine, greed and grief, (the often frightful human condition,) the question begs itself, might we need these prophets of doom and salvation?

It is certainly good art—a gothic masterpiece, so to speak—that makes you wonder if Hayter is putting us on, and exposing the bloody roots and the bloody fruit of religion as it is twisted in the hands of desperate people in hopes of understanding a chaotic universe. But even if it is in earnest, (Hayter has actually become a “reverend” in the last few years, the reason for her new artistic name,) Hayter’s artistic construction—her reimagining of some of America’s most famous hymns—has within it a transcendent, even “religious” quality that good art sometimes only strives for, but does not deliver in such a powerful and potent way.

It is a bold and beautiful album, in its own right. A picture of a world beset by angels and demons, salvation and damnation, hell and heaven. Perhaps only those who have felt truly “lost” can triumph in the decidedly binary vision of being “saved” from their sins and being snatched from “hell”. It will be interesting to see how the album will be received, as it seems, in its aesthetic and gothic leanings, not to be written for the common Christian attending a megachurch with their, perhaps, “toxic positivity” messages of Christ’s love and favor coming from the pulpit.

There is something satisfying about an album that deals in black and white with the evils and goods of the world; though, much like the Pentecostal church’s emphasis on a “personal relationship” with God, there is not much in the way of the prophet speaking to the collective evils or social ills that beset the world on the album. It seems like an album—a very well constructed album, to be sure—communicating what people throughout centuries, who have converted to Christianity have tried to voice, in song, or sermon, or whatever.

Like Bob Dylan sang before her: it is good to be SAVED! We can be happy at least, that some of Hayter’s grief has turned to joy, and that she wants to share the path that she’s found to salvation, in compelling artistic form.

Order SAVED! By Kirstin Michael Hayter HERE