boffo's Full Review: The Sporting Life by Diamanda Galas/John Paul Jone...
This is the only full-blown rock album Diamanda's ever done. This is album is a collaboration with John-Paul Jones who was the bassist for the slightly famous band Led Zeppelin, a band you might have heard of...
The album is easily Galás most humourus album although her sense of humour might be hard to take. She has described this album as a collection of "homocidal lovesongs" and the theme of most songs seems to be a woman killing her lover but this is sometimes hard to pick up on as in the opening track skotoseme because half of the lyrics on that song are in greek. The title track is the most over the top song and tells the tale of a group op prostitutes on a killing spree.
Musically it draws equally on Diamanda Galás and John-Paul Jones talents with the added help of Pete Thomas on drums, Thomas is also quite famous as the drummer in Elvis Costellos backing group the attractions. Guitars are present only on one track: the Vocal and slide guitar track "Last Man Down" a song dedicated to one of Diamandas friends lost to the HIV-virus wich she has sworn to fight. Except for that track the album consists of Bass and drums over wich Diamanda plays some organ and piano. And then there's the singing.... Diamanda's voice works extremly well to this kind of violent music, if you haven't heard her singing I am not even going to try to describe it, she has mastered pretty much every style of singing from operatic singing, to screams, to soul wailing, to sounds you wouldn't belive could come from a human throat. On a few tracks on this album such as in the gentle track "Tony" she shows that she could be a more mainstream vocalist as well. This album is reccomended for those looking for some of Diamanda's more accesible albums, the piano and voice albums "the singer" and "malediction & Prayer" are reccomended as well. This will probably be neccesary for huge Led Zeppelin fans as well, those that want everything done by the bands members. The closest comparison i can make is to Nick Caves early eighties band The Birthday Party who recorded equally violent music and fans of that band might like this as well...
otherwise if you like hard rocking experimental music and don't mind some morally "questionable" songs you might wan't to check this out as well...
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