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Rating: San Diego, August 29, 1955. Mother from Sparta, Father from Smyrna. It was summer, it was hot. Diamanda Galás was born. After a series of years of work and life between asylums commissioned by the Living Theatre, avant-garde vocal experiments in churches and cathedrals everywhere possible, amidst strong drugs, heavy sex, existences at the brink of survival, and probably numerous orgies of senses and demons in a mad world, between arrests, prestigious collaborations including one with Bad Seeds' Barry Adamson for Moss Side Story and a video directed by Coil's Sleazy Christopherson, closeness to Stratos for ethnic origins and new experimental directions, sensitivity to thrillers, losses, like that of her brother Philip-Dimitri to AIDS and the already pre-existing embrace of the HIV cause, amid heavy and thoughtful themes of death, despair, dependency on people, things, events, mental imbalances, religion, power, essence of politicized expression, literary enchantments for the Marquis, for the Human All Too Human, for Artaud, Baudelaire, Poe and a persistent repulsion for the Onochord... Towards the end of the eighties, Galás, perhaps tired, perhaps a bit disoriented and dazed by the years of violent psychic and expressive terrorism developed until then, transiently approached her Blues period. The Singer (1992), then this The Sporting Life.
Distanced from previous physical and sensory experiences in which her voice was used as an exceptional synthesizer of horror, she chose here different garments and concrete timbres, made of few and more measured Icarian Flights. The ominous sense of anguish and anxiety persisted, but it was different, never forgetful of the experience, the plague of the masses, the masks of the red death, the certainty of the Devil, of Turkey, of Greece, of a journey in Armenia.
The snake sings tracks with blood on them, curses of Smith & Wesson Handguns, stilettos and souped-up engines. Mi sangre corre al lado de ti (Los) Rituales de la Gasolina.
Released by Mute Records in 1994, the album could be considered an ancestor of what would be John Paul Jones' Zooma in 1999: stripped of those few guitars, with the same Pete Thomas from the Attractions on drums who would be on Jones' album, much less produced, decontaminated from too much technology and made of absolutely analog roots sounds. Sound flayed alive, exsanguine instrumentation for Drums, Bass, a Lap Steel, Piano, and Hammond Organ under Galás' performances. The Blues sung by a Greek Lady vomiting entrails is stunning and misleading, but the Mistress remains extraordinary, and the Luciferian affinities with Jones evoke a sinister benefit. Jones is full of class and in the scent of nobility. He is the same individual who during the luminous evolution of his band was always the one dressed in sequins in the shadows, a wise, elegant, gigantic sound machine. The Sporting Life is the slaughterhouse of Kashmir from Skótoseme, the Mephisto Saloon and the repeated and somewhat predictable breaks of You're Mine, the choked lament of Last Man Down, the mournful crawl of Tony, which is refinement. A Bazaar of truculence on Christmas night. Incomprehensible languages, a murderous bestiary roaming the blocks with blades ready to gut the flesh of alleged innocents, the blood flowing between the trees, her blood flowing next to yours. A cover promising splatter scenes so villainous that more vulgar is impossible. One of the ugliest ever seen, personally. Unusually scarce and uninspired lyrics, so much so that never as in this episode the instrumentalized words perfectly fulfill their role of functionality to the musicality of the tracks, almost exclusively expedients for her vocal derailments, to the point that the most significant text comes from a 1967 Soul cover. Consuming revenge in the old age of the other in Hex: <<So now I smile and wait, So now I wait for your old age and smile>>. Give the Lux Æterna to the torn marriage of Do You Take This Man:
<<I'm very disappointed in you
and I don't handle disappointment well
I could forgive you but I can never forgive - just forget
I don't have that much time to FORGET.
Husband, with this knife I do you adore
I take you out of this world baby with a lot of feeling
Honey, wasn't it beautiful?
I'll take what's mine and let the future keep the rest.
Baby, I take you from this world to my place
Where I can love you and we can be alone together.
Lies are for a longer life and I have got so much to say... Shut up!!! Shut up!!!>>
A psychopathic companion anyway. The unforgivable mistake avoided like the plague for so long by a Gargoyle who now feels compelled to kill.
A disappointed loyalty, the lovers' promise of death in what appears to be the tale of a votive murder-suicide.
Bodies go to body hell.
The destructive desire, the desperation of meeting in the dark at the end of the street:
<<At the dark end of the street
That is where we always meet
Hiding in shadows where we don't belong
Living in darkness to hide our wrong
Steal away to the dark end of the street>>
A sky of ash and soot flies over the buildings.
Stone gargoyles look down from the ledge of a building.
[BLACK MAIL SQUARE: The Second Coming]
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