GUILTY OF BEING TOO PRECISE: DIAMANDA GALA
by Luke Beesley

The Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
October 17, 2005 Monday

Diamanda Galas, Guilty Guilty Guilty
Concert Hall, QPAC, October 14

ECCENTRIC, internationally renowned vocalist and pianist Diamanda
Galas’ new show Guilty Guilty Guilty was much more subdued than the
reputation preceding her.

Her Defixiones performance piece is one that’s stirred up audiences
around the world with its angry exploration of a denial, by Turkey
and America, of Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greek genocide.

This performance, though, was a moody, almost conventional, concert of
blues, country and jazz tunes on the themes love, death and injustice;
and she began deep and husky and bluesy, working over the bass notes
on the piano in a cover of Johnny Cash’s Long Black Veil.

Her approach to these iconic songs including original tunes and those
by artists as disparate as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Edith Piaf was
to begin at the bottom of the register and then push up through the
murky tones of the piano. She experimented with varied emphasis on
familiar blues moans and screeches, and her voice was heavy with a
very physical vibrato that kind of waved the audience in.

She followed Cash with O. V. Wright’s Eight Men and Four Women and
skipped octaves, suddenly, to some siren-like melodies.

Her incredible range (three-and-a-half octaves) almost mimicked the
piano’s, yet in a unique version of Ralph Stanley’s

O Death, she climbed to a sustained, scratchy note that at one point
seemed to split in two, the scratchiness separating from the fuller
note before bursting to a pure, strong voice again.

It was a highlight, this shaft of light through the gothic shade.

Overall her performance was characterised by a confident vocal control,
though something was missing.

This is music of raw, emotive communication, and it’s heightened by
a strong personal connection with an audience.

Oddly, for such an erratic and flighty approach to technique, the
performance seemed a little too precise. Her fairly still presence
at the piano for the hour or so, and demure presence on the stage,
came across as a little distanced.

As a bookend to her opening song (before covers James Carr and Desmond
Carter, as encores) Galas attempted a very slow version of Cash’s
25 Minutes to Go. She played it hauntingly, counting down the last
minutes of a man’s life before the gallows, the last line “And now
I’m swingin’ and here I go”, ironically emphasising her deathly take
on a music that’s often described as “swing” or “swingin”‘.

It was a witty end to a warmly received program of melancholic blues.