Three and a half decades after Diamanda Galás’ first recordings as a solo vocalist, she still talks about her singing as an act of violence. Musing to Rolling Stone about her performance of the folk standard “O Death”—versions of which are included on both of her new records, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem—she describes it as a cycle of destruction. “You keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and desiccating it and putting it back together until it becomes a new life form,” she says. “And then you rip it apart again.” It’s an accurate description of that solo piano piece—which traffics in the California-born composer’s longheld affinities for bebop, blues, and stately morbidity—but it’s also a handy summation of the harrowing work Galás has made for her whole career.
Whether she’s offering abstract expressionism on her original compositions or shredding the American songbook—as she does on this pair of releases—the uniting factor is a sense of attack. Galás’ singing is most often clipped, multisyllabic, microtonal. Her bracing classicist techniques are employed with an executioner’s heavy hand. Galás’ bellow has added ever-darker textures to grim records about the specter of AIDS and the horrors of genocide. She has made more than one record with a titular nod to Satan. Darkness is kind of her thing.
By these standards—and even compared to her other efforts interpreting jazz and blues classics, like 1992’s The Singer or 2003’s La Serpenta Canta—her two new records are relatively muted. It’s a direction she’s been moving in for the last couple of decades. But in the nine years since her last album, the live document Guilty Guilty Guilty, Galás has finally perfected this restrained version of her deadly approach.
All the Way’s rendition of Lew Brown & Ray Henderson's “The Thrill is Gone” starts here with piano lines that feel as prim as gently struck wine glasses. Her sustained vocal tones mostly mirror the warm, slow simmer of the original, even when she pushes the melody to more frigid territory. Then suddenly, she strikes. Her soprano voice turns to sandpaper, scrubbing away at your eardrums with the limber microtonal bursts that have become her weapons of choice over the years. Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.
This structure is affecting, but perhaps even more so on At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem. Galás has made a number of live albums over the years (and even parts of All the Way were recorded at shows in Europe), and they’ve typically been highlights. They’re reminders that her streaking and arcing vocal feats are actually emitting from a real human. All the Way occasionally dabbles in vocal effects processing—like the dizzy delay that shades the title track—but At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person. The violence feels even more harrowing when you can sense Galás at the center of it, as author and subject.
As through most of her career, it’s striking to hear Galás’ splintered take on compositions that aren’t her own. There’s a cliché about covers pulling songs apart at the seams, but over the years Galás has become adept at outright dismemberment—irrevocably altering the silhouette of iconic moments in popular music. She makes familiar sounds feel unsettled and unfamiliar. Once conventions are shirked, a whole host of terrifying possibilities opens up, especially with the knowledge that Galás probably won’t show any mercy. Listening to these records is like catching a glimpse of an elongated shadow at the other end of a dark alley, not knowing what inhuman form awaits, but knowing there’s no escape.
Correction: A previous version of this review misidentified the original version of “The Thrill is Gone.”
