While the blues had always been a presence in Galas' work, The Singer was the first time she presented them on their own and she did so in a stark manner, with only herself on voice and keyboards. Her piano playing is fairly harsh and jagged, almost evoking a reined-in Cecil Taylor. But it's her vocal work that fans are interested in, and here she strikes an often awkward balance between her natural bent toward extreme stylings and the more conservative forms that the material tends to require. On several ...   [ read more ]

CD $17.99

Other people also bought:

The Album Leaf  In a Safe Place , Original Soundtrack  Friday Night Lights (Explosions in the Sky), Mono  You Are There

Diamanda Galas, who has been known for both her own work and as a singer of extremely demanding modern scores, created this heart-wrenching cry about the physical suffering caused by the AIDS plague being compounded by the shameful arrogance of self-appointed moralists. Maintaining an incredible intensity and depth for over an hour's solo vocal (recorded live at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC, with suitably minimal band and electronics backup), Galas proceeds through Mahalia Jackson-...   [ read more ]

CD $11.38

Vena Cava is about as close as Diamanda Galas has come to a spoken word album, a suite of pieces in which she adopts varying personalities of mental patients or AIDS-related dementia. Between the mumblings and screams she intersperses snatches of songs, including "Amazing Grace" and "Hush Little Baby," but the overall effect is of listening to the carrying-ons of a madwoman, which is presumably the album's intent. But the personae chosen seem somehow banal and prosaic, the same "types" one runs...   [ read more ]

CD $11.38