Vena Cava is about as close as
Diamanda Galas has come to a spoken word album, a suite of pieces in which she adopts varying personalities of mental patients or AIDS-related dementia. Between the mumblings and screams she intersperses snatches of songs, including "Amazing Grace" and "Hush Little Baby," but the overall effect is of listening to the carrying-ons of a madwoman, which is presumably the album's intent. But the personae chosen seem somehow banal and prosaic, the same "types" one runs across in any dozen cheap asylum movies, and the episodic nature of the recording reminds one painfully of multiple-character performances like those of
Lily Tomlin. The sweep, power, and incisiveness of earlier works of hers, like "Wild Women With Steak-Knives" or "Panoptikon," are largely absent. This was recorded live at the Kitchen, a New York space, and it may be argued that the disc necessarily lacks some degree of theatrical presence, but, despite the astonishing and admirable qualities of
Galas' voice, the listener may find the end result surprisingly thin. ~ Brian Olewnick