Diamanda Galás

Guilty Guilty Guilty

(Mute Records)

A new Diamanda Galás disc is always an occasion for joy and terror. Few musicians are more prodigiously gifted than Galás, who has a unique ability to transfigure any song with her three-and-a-half-octave voice and hyper-muscular piano playing, but she also possesses an equally unique ability to locate the dark matter in the recesses of any song and bring it to light. If not light, perhaps auditory perception.

This live recording recorded at her annual Valentine’s Day Massacre concert in New York City is a collection of country, blues, soul, and chanson that ranges from country standard “Long Black Veil” to Edith Piaf’s “Heaven Have Mercy.” Some of them seem made to order for her dark magic. “O Death,” the most gripping cut from the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack, is as cathartic here as anyone who knows Galás might expect. Her piano rumbles in from the low end as her voice somberly sustains the invocation, stretching and bending the “O” before opening the floodgates of her entire vocal repertoire of echoes, chants, howls, and shrieks, perhaps like an after-death experience, except without the light at the end of the tunnel or any warm and fuzzy family members greeting you. Less expected are songs like Nat King Cole’s gentle “Autumn Leaves,” which she treats with a lovely piano intro that shifts between foreboding chords and light trills before she enters with an eerie, childlike voice—the intimacy of a madwoman confiding inexplicable secrets. Perhaps the straightest version here is the Piaf, which she declaims with resonant respect for the song’s anti-war message.

Galás’s voice continues to astonish—one might call it a force of nature, but this would discount the serious intelligence behind it—and for all her own compositional ability, she is an arresting interpreter of other artist’s material.

—edward batchelder