Diamanda Galás
Schrei X

When reviewing a Diamanda Galas album, one cannot avoid using words like "hell," "dark," "original," "extreme." Yes indeed, because there is no one darker and more original than the Greek singer-performer.

Born in 1955, Diamanda Galas is the daughter of two overly protective parents who forbade her even the most banal adolescent actions, and so the young girl began to find solace in music and literature: Pasolini, Poe, Baudelaire were her favorite authors. Her passion for literature would wind through her Litanies of Satan from 1982, which launched her recording career. The album was perhaps the most extreme and isolated to date, containing only two tracks over ten minutes long, shattering all the etiquettes of traditional singing: shrieks, screams, growls, lyrical interventions. An electronic delirium that shocked many at the time.
But the essence of the singer did not stop there: she recorded various albums, each more extreme, each more experimental, occasionally focusing on song form (notably the fabulous covers album "The Singer" and the rock shift of "The Sporting Life" with the bassist from Led Zeppelin, from whose tracklist emerges one of the darkest and most desperate songs ever, the stunning "Tony"). Her lyrics speak of hate, racism, torture, AIDS (following the sudden death of her brother from the HIV virus) and her trusted companion is the piano, an instrument that appears on most of her records, except for this relentless descent into the underworld.

If the apocalypse were to have a sound, it would undoubtedly be this "Schrei X," one of the musician's strangest, most avant-garde, and unclassifiable albums: only voice and electronics appear, protagonists of the twenty-four tracks that rarely exceed two minutes (except for the devastating and splendid final closure, titled "Hee Shock Die").

The first seconds of the opening masterpiece "Do Room" are enough to understand that you are facing an album different from the usual. Many, in fact, after the recording with John Paul Jones ("The Sporting Life" in 1994), had hoped for a rock shift from her, who possesses one of the most incredible female voices of the millennium. Who knows how many unsuspecting people found themselves bewildered by this work: Galas screams (as the title suggests), challenges the monster lurking in her throat, disintegrates song form, raping her vocal abilities.

The chills are intense. A truly enviable tour de force floods the listener, who is part of screams, increasingly wrenching, diabolical laughter, voices, electronic effects, spectral choirs.

Rarely enjoyable to listen to with pleasure, "Schrei X" is nevertheless an indefinable work, one of Galas' most incredible sound manifestos.

An incredible journey, a spiral of madness leading to the last circle of hell.