Diamanda Galàs is a bizarre, highly charismatic presence in Broken Gargoyles — album review

If Muse treat apocalypticism as a rollercoaster ride, then for Diamanda Galàs it’s no game. Since her recording debut 40 years ago, the US experimentalist has amassed a formidable body of work that treats history as an abject pit of despair. Texts are taken from works by death-obsessed writers such as Charles Baudelaire. Subject matter includes psychosis, torture and disease, sung by Galàs with a confrontational array of growls, hisses, soprano notes and fingers-down-blackboard shrieks: an anti-aria for the end of the world.

Her new album Broken Gargoyles is about the cheerless topic of mutilated first world war soldiers, with lyrics taken from poems by the German Expressionist poet George Heym, a follower of Baudelaire. It originated as an audiovisual installation made in collaboration with sound artist Daniel Neumann. There are two long tracks, “Mutilatus” and “Abiectio”. This pair of portentous titles opens a sinisterly creaking door on to the musical equivalent of an art-house horror film.

Its star is Galàs. At 66, she remains a highly charismatic, albeit bizarre, presence at the microphone. She recites Heym’s verses in a guttural declamatory manner, as though the words were hunks of meat being presented at a ceremonial feast. Even if you don’t understand German, you feel their physical force as sound objects. At times, electronic distortion gives her the demonic quality of a death-metal vocalist. Elsewhere, she sings multi-tracked high harmonies like an infernal choir or subsides into unintelligible noisemaking — a communicative breakdown.

The music rolls by like a blasted landscape. Low piano chords from the sinistral side of the keyboard are struck with a tolling emphasis. Electronic sounds clank and whirr in the background. Occasionally the bright tone of a bell rings out, an effect borrowed from psychedelic music. There, it signifies a moment of higher consciousness. Here, it opens our mind to the depths, a discomfiting but necessary act of reckoning.

★★★★☆

‘Broken Gargoyles’ is released by Intravenal Sound Operations