My Review: Diamanda Galas - Broken Gargoyles

 My Review:

Diamanda Galas - Broken Gargoyles

Unique.

A word that must be studied, in these terrible times in which every term becomes an opinion and a bad comfort. In which everything is broken and defrauded of its origin.

Diamanda Galas sets things right: like it or not, she is unique and her new work is a slab on our breaths, a guillotine that decides to lead us to slow suffocation, because she is the only one able to do it. Broken Gargoyles is a continuous tremor, a ship rocking in the zone where comfort is a useless, primitive dream. So we meet tears, vomit, discomfort, fear, the sense of unbearableness that enchants and removes any attempt to escape.

We are in Germany for what was the basis of a 2021 installation created as the unnatural birth of Covid 19, inspired and sustained by the poems of Georg Heym, in which leprosy and plague are the dominators of all despair, heavy splinters with an evil grin that play at knocking down any idea of survival. And everything that is delirium and entails forced isolation enters Diamanda's uvula and the hypnotising, terrifying music that freezes all resistance: listening to her compositions is like being in an electric chair, without dying. Her voice descends into the abysses to be seen from Everest and then from every nebula seduced and fascinated by this artist, who smashes every interpretative code and mocks all those who need instruments and effects to try to get to the place where she is able to go. Instead, they fail.

hit by bullets and it is to those images that the album cover refers.

Then the plague and cholera come as thorny topics to make what Covid has generated in the minds of millions almost banal.

Diamanda disembodies, strips away the blackness of blood and puts it in our ears, generating terror and paralysis as a dutiful subliminal dance.

The instruments she has chosen are few but effective: keyboards, violin, piano, guitar and her voice, an enduring and inexplicable moment that connects the others and condemns them to a perfectly successful gregarious work. 

Germany, as always, capitalises every event for evolution, which becomes the drug for every manifest human aberration. Diamanda puts the nails of her intelligence at the disposal of her artistic project and concentrates on the history of suffering by placing herself at its side, studying it.

Everything ugly and frightening passes through her microscope and harmonizes to show the world the seeds of unbearable tragedies, and her music and vocals do exactly the same. 

A work about human limitations and its splinters that make life impossible: she produces an album that presents her to us in splendid form as she has not been for a long time, but this does not surprise the scribe. Because Diamanda, in order to rise, has to study, evaluate, approach her sensibility where human defeat displays its black feathers, where thought is fertilised by wickedness and hatred. With her, it is once again possible to use the term 'masterpiece', which in this groove is unbearable, a crazed artery from which the gushing blood can only lead to gravitate into the mystery of death. 

The first heretical cut, Mutilatus, was composed between 2012 and 2013: revised and corrected, it includes two poems by Georg Heym, Das Fieberspital and Die Dämonen der Stad, in which the demons of fear are led through frightening and liturgical sound textures, where the dramatic nature of topics finds in Diamanda's voice a satanic whip able to exhaust and annihilate. With her musical partner Kris Townes, the Goddess establishes a vast summation of unequivocal, cultured and perfect exaggerations to accompany the listener towards a visceral path of continuous avant-garde.

Twenty-three minutes and forty seconds in which the German nation is covered in dripping lava, the atmosphere is putrid and bloody, and time becomes the worst enemy of every breath. 

All seen from a hospital, a place for mutilated bodies deprived of meaning, except that of fully manifesting the power of evil.

The second malignant friction is called Abiectio, born from three poems by the German poet: Der Blind, Der Hunger and Das Fieberspital.

War, hunger, loneliness, despair and the chronic propensity to become screaming and wrenching throats are the essential pivots of these seventeen minutes and twenty-one seconds, in which the voice of the American singer returns to the splendour of her debut and nails us on crosses full of spikes and claws, where every inch of our skin is lifted up and thrown into the sky.  

Everything that is inclined to be visionary and intellectual is located in this lugubrious composition, a theatre of unbearableness and one of the most impactful moments of her career. Death as a traumatic fact in the eyes of soldiers and poor people, united by the same destiny, finds its idyll and power in these cadenced and muddy verses, ointments that do not heal but seem to make pain a sustainable event. Failing.

Because Diamanda does not see death as an enemy, but certainly the manner in which it occurs is studied by her in order to affirm the absence of an acceptable way.

And here, too, the hospital serves as a collector of pettiness, of diseases that exhaust all strength and take away the supposed joy of living.

So her project seems to be the single, essential plan of a doctor who notes, with paralysed eyes, what is happening on the skin and in the souls of bodies martyred by bullets with the effects of two diseases that are explainable but not bearable atrocities.

The horrible state of decay and fracture of the human body is made clear by the poet Heym, and Diamanda and her collaborator Daniel Neumann do nothing more than visualise it with the incredible result of making it all Art, with the possibility of ignoring this gratuitous and perpetual violence, out of convenience and fear. But they tell of realities experienced by human, real lives, which cannot always be escaped: she does not fail to make us aware of this, generating doubts and then the certainty that no one is exempt from this possibility.

The claustrophobic, existential and excruciating poetry of the History of Evil and the territories of human disaster find precise trajectories in this sensory fight called Broken Gargoyles: Diamanda reports it all with a firm and precise morality, draws infinite voids and shows her talent, which, starting from real events, finds its throne through an artistic attitude of unbearable importance. As always, more than ever, to find oneself listening to her flashes is to be purified on the one hand and devastated on the other. Hearing her sing and speak in the German language terrifies, she delves precisely into the territory of two atrocious moments in the history of that nation, capable of not succumbing but always having open wounds.

The Greek-born singer continues to explore what is troublesome, what we guiltily refuse to observe and study: erecting herself inside the volcano of all madness, with her ladle she tries to make the violent movement of life even denser in order to deliver us encyclopaedias of forced wisdom, like a tentacular and heavy fist.

In the presentation of the album, Diamanda wore a balaclava with the inscription Mutilatus, using descriptive words that convinced the scribe of the enormous journey of an artist devoted to human sacrifice, because noting how history is unable to change but only to repeat itself must necessarily represent a form of duty for her, heavy and difficult but with the awareness of having put on the table a merciless and exhaustive analysis that will not fail to wound and make us all a bubble of mud and blood inside the Theatre of Horrors and Pain.

In the meantime, let's take History, go to Germany and begin to feel in every beat, in every thought, the misery of our earthly sojourn.

I am convinced that Diamanda will one day be the one to open the gates of purgatory, not failing to let us hear the verses of this album, which becomes the rebellious sentinel of every mental reluctance.

A Masterpiece that will burn in our ears and give us a yellow fever, with the bullet holes of miserable existences defining it all: when death is described in life, then we can only thank Diamanda for saving us from the deception of dreams and for taking note that existence is a continuous mutilation…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

26th August 2022

https://open.spotify.com/album/2kiRbAOjsR3WSnuM8qbZ7F?si=B2mx0yG8QZSkDyh4OqmqIQ