Diamanda Galás: Masque of the Red Death Trilogy (1986-88)

The Divine Punishment (1986)

Queen of avant-garde, Diamanda Galás, can give grown men nightmares with her extraordinary vocal range. Her performance is unashamedly theatrical and her subject matter often controversial.

The Divine Punishment is the first part of her Masque of the Red Death Trilogy. It has only two songs, but they're split into nine parts.

Listening to it in the dark can give the impression that the listener is being haunted by incensed spirits reading scripture, knowing full well that you'll never be able to forget their aural bouts of primal terror. They don't care. They want you to lose sleep.

Saint of the Pit (1986)

Part two gives Galás an opportunity to let her voice soar to unconstrained levels. Not only can it make your ears wince uncomfortably, it can somehow manage to fill the hollow spaces inside of bones and make them shiver.

I've said it before but it’s equally true here: music to induce nightmares. It's less overtly avant-garde and more traditionally structured than part one, but it's as eerie in its own way.

If a talented director from the same era had made a Kubrick-esque sci-fi film and got Galás to provide the score for it, it could've been terrific.

You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988)

If you like it loud but also value your hearing, then it may be advisable to not sit too close to your speakers as the album begins or Galás' unique version of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot could mercilessly take it from you.

It flows sharply into the second track, which begins the transformation into a more traditional album makeup.

She still howls like a banshee when necessary to get the point across, but the gospel-influenced weirdness is more accessible than the two accompanying albums before it. Well. mostly... she sounds like she's dying on the closing track. It's unnerving.