The List
by Monica Kendrick
Diamanda Galas is too towering a figure for any single subculture to lay claim to her, but I’m sure the goth crowd will be out in force for these MCA dates—especially given their proximity to Halloween. With a supernatural voice that can sweep from operatic to animalistic, Galas is part Siren and part Fury, part angel and part demon, part professional mourner from beyond time and part cabaret diva from the seventh circle of hell. She’s immersed herself in grief and terror and outrage in all its forms, first achieving notoriety in 1990, when she performed her bloody, blasphemous Plague Mass—a furious indictment of the world’s indifference to the AIDS epidemic—in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. And she continues to speak the unspeakable: the 2003 double CD Defixiones: Will and Testament is a harrowing requiem for the victims of the genocides in Turkey during World War I (still a loaded subject, as the recent semantics debate in Congress proves). Her “lighter” works include a playfully gruesome rock album with John Paul Jones and several collections of sinister, deconstructed rock and blues standards—she can create a mesmerizing, devastating vortex with just her voice and a piano. She’s performing two different programs here; tonight is “Songs of Exile,” which focuses on the work of musicians and poets who have lived as exiles or refugees