Customer Reviews

Judgement Day [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Frank Abbinati's review of Judgement Day is without merit. His beginning represents a specific recount of what he feels about specific works that Diamanda has performed. However, when Mr. Abbinati turns to review the Judgement Day video he becomes vague. He simply dismisses the piano playing as "basic" and that Diamanda does not have the necessary language to sing the blues and that the performances were horrible in the video.

Well, which ones(horrible performances) specifically and why? He does not mention. Why does he think that Diamanda does not have the language of the blues? He fails to mention the vocal technique discrepencies that he says she has. Also he confuses minimalism with "basic piano playing". The blues and gospel musics need not be cluttered with endless streams of arpeggios, coma induced (harmonic)minor/major scales, and endless thematic musical structures meanderings. In short, Diamanda Galas' piano playing, like her singing, gets right to the point without the "bonus material" that is standard with classical music. Mr. Abbinati, we are talking about different styles of music are we not?

Anyway, Frank Abbinati's review is vague and bewildering-are we listening to the same thing, the same way? I would recommend to Mr. Abbinati to read Julia Cameron's book, The Artists Way, to become unblocked.

Contrary to Mr. Abbinati, Diamanda Galas has the vocal technique and timbre to perform the blues, gospel, opera, etc. She provides moving, jarring renditions of such classics as Gloomy Sunday, Insane Asylum, I Put A Spell On You and the like. Her blues and gospel screams from the blood from the soul. Her blues and gospel eclipses the mocking blues and gospel of some of her well-known contemporaries.

Check this video out as well as the album from which this tour was taken from, The Singer. Start there and dig further under the surface of one the most talented voices this generation has ever witnessed.

When you look in the morror, what do you see? Diamanda Galas has placed us all in a realm of confusion, anger, passion and beauty with her "Judgement Day" performance. The pounding of her piano and the wailing of her soul come together in sights and sounds some people might turn away from. But for the adventurous, this operatically trained singer/songwriter deserves a place on your shelf. She'll take you for a ride you won't soon forget, nor want to.

With a voice that has been commented on enough, Diamanda delivers a collection of blues standards in a way that, surely, the composers never intended. We scratch the limit of beauty and go so far into intensity that the songs lift to a whole new level. Diamanda is not interested in Taste in the sense that most people know it. Like any good artist, she chooses to break new ground instead. Having gone through works of utter hysteria, anger and panic in the past, here she is more intimate than ever, letting us close, singing for us, hollering for us, weeping, cackling, bleeding for us. The fact that she's not performing naked from the waste up, covered in blood this time, doesn't make this video any less important than her previous work. Here, everything has been peeled away to reveal the bare talent. And it's there, believe me. Diamanda has, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most interesting voices of our times, and she has the intellect and artistic nerve to back it up.

If you've followed her career,the early part of the Eighties she was had no boundaries utilizing Baudelaire Litanies of Satan or, composers Iannis Xenakis wanted her for n'shima,or Vinko Globokar for une jour comme une autre, about the rape and torture of a woman,she herself had an incredibly powerful work for a thousand voices indictment of the Greek junta of the the blood spilt during the coup of the late Sixties, her Panoptikon utilized Foucault's work on the repression of the human spirit, prisons and domination of the post-modern world, her own Wild Woman with SteakKnives revealed a personal searing portrait of suppression and struggle with a dry microphone. She now still hits hard, burning newspapers on stage at the live performance at MEAT, but the blues singing is horrible and not her language,she hasn't the verbal colour for it, you can see why she chooses to sing the blues, it's the most accessible form of struggle music, but you need to do something with the language you adopt and she doesn't do that. The piano playing is less than basic, well all that is required anyway,but she had the intense capabilities of utilizing the vigours of musical accompaniment in electronics, like a 1,000 pound dragonfly buzzing above an abbatoir commenting. Her politics, be it feminist has lost its content, it can only be a voice of outrage, which is a good start, but if it ends there, well it's not enough, Annie Sprinkle's activism shows a greater diversity, especially in the plurality of the after post-modernity where no priorities exist anymore.