Photo by Paula Court 2007

“[Galás’ songs] are, first, fascinating to hear, and, perhaps more importantly, radical in their redefinition of what music can and should be. Her artistry is inimitably bold, impossibly masterful. No one else will go where she goes vocally. Or maybe it’s simply that no one else can.”—Megan Milks, popmatters.com (November 2007)

“ ‘O, Death,’ is prime—and primal—Galás. She [plays] gutsy, rippling notes that hang in the air like a deftly poised dagger in a New Orleans bawdy house [and] introduces the lyrics as if her lungs were a dark, forgotten cave, the words sepulchral, final. Before too long, she launches into a succession of improvisations —dizzying variations in pitch, piercing wordless leaps up the scale, an extreme aria that loops and plunges back into bluesy vigor.”—Steve Dollar, Time Out Chicago (October, 2007)

"[Galas] turned ‘O Death’ into a form-changing keen meant to set all the dogs to howling the next holler over, because they hear the banshees first (...) in ‘Keigome Keigome’ (I'm burning, I'm burning) Galas lets that voice growl and roar before erupting into shrieking high-end ululations that sound like a flock of carnivorous birds beating themselves to death against a vaulted ceiling."—Monica Kendrick, Chicago Reader (October 2007)

“Galás’s operatic blues gnaw right at the soul here, a wordless moan of grief and pain somewhere between the spine tingling ululatory howl of a Middle Eastern funeral and distracted humming from a cell at the asylum.”—The Wire

“She's been compared to a vampire, a Valkyrie and a lizard queen--all appropriate, since she looks undead, and ready to suck the life from your still-beating heart."—Time Out NY (2007)

"Specializing in music that can be as jarring as it is uncompromising, the dark avant-garde chanteuse, who can smoothly croon and hellishly exhort in equal measure, eschews the notion that music should simply entertain, Galas rarely fails to make an indelible impression, whether exhuming old blues standards or wailing for the unjustly deceased."—Alex Ross, The New Yorker (2006)

 “No other presence in new music is so dramatic, so frightening, so controversial as Diamanda Galás.  Her voice is the most phenomenal in new music.”—Kyle Gann, American Music in the 20th Century