In a way, reviewing an album by Diamanda Gal\u00e1s is akin to reviewing a forest or a mountain. You likely wouldn\u2019t say, \u201cThat boulder field would look better if it was moved slightly to the left,\u201d or \u201cThese 800-year-old trees are okay, but I\u2019d like them better if they were 900 years old.\u201d So it is that the music of Diamanda Gal\u00e1s offers an uncompromising vision\u2014often harrowing, always challenging\u2014that explores some of the darkest parts of humanity, and you can choose to either go on the journey or not.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
While Gal\u00e1s has created works about the AIDS crisis and the Armenian, Anatolian-Greek and Assyrian genocides of 1914 and 1923, she has also covered Willie Dixon and Roy Acuff. Led Zeppelin\u2019s John Paul Jones has been a collaborator, as has Barry Adamson of Magazine and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. So she can do it all\u2026 and has. But it\u2019s true that she\u2019s best known for her deep dives into mass human trauma and cruelty, using her remarkable, singular soprano to convey all manner of pain and madness with occasional breaks of rapture and transcendence. Her new record, Broken Gargoyles<\/i>, is firmly of this type.<\/p>\n
A work first performed in a leper sanctuary and billed in the liner notes as a \u201csound installation,\u201d the lyrical content of the record is largely based on the poetry of Georg Heym. Heym was a pre-WWI writer who tragically died at the age of 24 while trying to save a friend who had fallen through the ice while the two had been skating. The major text, \u201cDas Fieberspital,\u201d describes in brutal detail a yellow fever ward, and is split across the albums two tracks, \u201cMutilatus\u201d and \u201cAbiectio.\u201d Also used are additional Heym poems that deal with hunger and blindness, both physical and metaphorical, among other maladies of the human body and psyche. The work of Heym is then deftly, if obliquely, used to create an atmosphere that represents the torment of the Broken Gargoyles depicted in the 1924 book \u201cWar Against War!\u201d by anti-war campaigner Ernst Friedrich. Friedrich\u2019s book was controversial, not least for including photographs depicting the devastating facial injuries suffered by WWI soldiers, some of which are reproduced in the CD booklet. That anyone could survive such injuries emotionally, let alone physically, is staggering. Of course, one presumes most of these men, referred to as \u201cgargoyles\u201d by their hospital caretakers, didn\u2019t survive for long.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s a bit of the foundation of the album. From there it\u2019s all mountains and forests. Which is to say, Gal\u00e1s uses her supernaturally expressive voice to articulate seemingly every form of pain and insanity that the above precis might suggest, and you either open yourself to it or choose something different. Occasionally there is what sounds like joy and even humor, though whether those tones arise from a sound mind is open to interpretation. However, it is perhaps high among the remarkable talents of <\/p>\n
Gal\u00e1s that this music is not dour or despairing. Frightening at times? Yes. Difficult?\u00a0 Most certainly. But as piano, synth, strings, and other sometimes improvised instrumentation fades in and out, processed sounds ebb and flow, and a male voice, Robert Knoke, adds something like demonic texture, the listener is able to consider the folly of so much of human history from a slight remove. This is something that good art allows, and in that shared recognition is a catharsis for the receiver as well as the creator. Granted, most listeners probably aren\u2019t shrieking along in the shower with Gal\u00e1s, but you probably know what I\u2019m saying.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re familiar with Diamanda Gal\u00e1s you will want to hear this, if you have not already. If you\u2019re curious, I can draw some tenuous comparisons to early Einst\u00fcrzende Neubauten (possibly heightened due to the words being in German), and the mood conjured by the more monolithic work of Jarboe-era Swans. Although there\u2019s no mistaking the classical training in Gal\u00e1s\u2019 background, and a symphonic and operatic undertow always churns beneath the surface.<\/p>\n
It should also be said that this is a timely record. With humanity not only finding brand new ways to potentially destroy itself on the digital and ecological battlefields, a 20th century-style war of the type we thought we were done with\u2014one not entirely removed from that which created Broken Gargoyles in the first place\u2014again now rages in Europe. Gal\u00e1s shows us in no uncertain terms the insane flaw that seems to reside in humanity, never truly dormant, and shines a bright light on it with the understanding that if we don\u2019t learn to recognize it and, indeed, come to know it intimately, we will never overcome it. These days the need to transcend the darkness in our own nature is ringing at a fever pitch. One of the sounds that urgency takes is Diamanda Gal\u00e1s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":34653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10801],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-46508","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-diamanda-galas","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46508"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}