Overview
“The Divine Punishment” is the third album by Diamanda Galás, an American musician, singer-songwriter, and visual artist.
Commentary
Galás is a Greek American born in 1955 in San Diego, California. She is known for her avant-garde performances with her nearly four-octave vocal range including soprano sfogato.
Galás has also campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of the infected.
“The Divine Punishment” was produced as the first installment in her “Masque of the Red Death” trilogy about the AIDS epidemic. It was released on LP by Mute Records in 1986.
“The Divine Punishment” is a dark and avant-garde album that contains Galás’s vocal performances like chanting.
The back tracks are composed of analogue synthesizers, piano, percussions, and sound effects. Galás also plays synths and piano.
The additional synthesizer was played by London-based producer/composer Dave Hunt.
The atmosphere of the whole album is similar to gothic rock and neoclassical dark wave.
Galás’s vocal performances are soul-shaking and impressive. She uses different styles, such as screaming, growling, high voices like opera, singing like Middle Eastern folk music, and whispering with breathy voices.
The texts are mainly based on quotations from the Old Testament.
Mute Records released “The Divine Punishment & Saint of the Pit”, a composition of the first and second parts of the trilogy “Masque of The Red Death”, on CD in 1988.
Mute Records also released the double CD “Masque of the Red Death”, a composition of the three albums of the trilogy, in the same year.
In 2022, the remastered edition of the album “The Divine Punishment” was released on LP and CD by Galás’s record label Intravenal Sound Operations.
Track Listing
- Deliver Me From Mine Enemies (19:15)
- I. This Is the Law of the Plague
- II. Deliver Me From Mine Enemies
- III. We Shall not Accept Your Quarantine
- IV. Εξελόυμε
- V. Γιατί, Ό Θεός?
- VI. Psalm 22
- Free Among the Dead (13:32)
- I. Psalm 88
- II. Lamentations
- III. Sono L’Antichristo