***1/2 Diamanda Galás

MALEDICTION AND PRAYER

(Asphodel)

As sung in church, the gospel standard "Live the Life" is a rousing, sermon-ending send-off, the congregation's promise to remember the lessons of the pulpit after they leave the pews. At the song's heart, though, is a rejection of hypocrisy in general. So that when Memphis garage-punks the Oblivians covered it last year -- this from the band who wrote "I'm Not a Sicko, There's a Plate in My Head" -- the refrain became something like a threat.

But neither of these interpretations fits avant-diva Diamanda Galás when she sings "Live the Life" toward the end of the program on her live album Malediction and Prayer. Returning to the terrain of 1992's The Singer -- applying her blood-curdling, multi-register gothic shriek and moan to spirituals, bucket-of-blood blues, and R&B standards -- she turns "The Thrill Is Gone," Son House's soul-chilling "Death Letter," and Johnny Cash's "25 Minutes To Go," into a funereal cabaret of the damned, her impossible trills and basso rumblings mounting a litany of anguish, determination, and loss. By the time she sings the words "I'm gonna live the life I sing about in my songs," the refrain sounds not like a promise, or a threat, but like the most unbearable of curses, the words of one who is doomed to darkness, almost like a warning to the rest of us who would follow her, even though she would not relieve herself of the spell if she could.

-- Carly Carioli