Vena Cava

Entertainment Weekly - "...[Diamanda Galas] specializes in torturous, brutal sound experiments that make Nine Inch Nails sound like Muzak..." - Rating: B Entertainment Weekly (10/15/93, p.76) - "...[Diamanda Galas] specializes in torturous, brutal sound experiments that make Nine Inch Nails sound like Muzak..." - Rating: B

With VENA CAVA avant garde diva Diamanda Galas continues her exploration of humans afflicted with illness. While previous albums, like 1991's PLAGUE MASS, dealt overtly with the AIDS epidemic, VENA CAVA finds Galas adopting the persona of a character suffering from an unnamed disease and teetering on the verge of sanity. In this way the album is in thematic keeping with Galas's earlier work, but also extends her discography past the overtly political and in the direction of open-ended fictional texts.
Galas's voice--a high soprano capable of tremendous range and a Pandora's box of wails, screeches, mutterings, and the like--is at center stage. There are tunes, lullabies, and convulsive vocalizations here, yet it's all in the service of painting a portrait of the album's protagonist, a woman grappling with an ever-loosening grip on reality. Unsettling and emotionally draining, the album is not an easy listen, but fans of avant-leaning work and bold vocal experimentation will find much to appreciate here.|

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