You Must Be Certain of the Devil [LP], Diamanda Galas, Vinyl

Riding in on an eviscerating vocal alarm call and originally released in 1988 as the final installment of her Masque of the Red Death trilogy, Diamanda Galás' You Must Be Certain of the Devil is as unflinching now as it was on release in 1988. It remains a swaggering, furious fuck-you to those who might cast aside the sick and dying in the name of faith and scripture. Often misunderstood as simply "dark" for it's subject matter, You Must Be Certain of the Devil in fact shines a light of such total exposure it leaves nowhere to hide, forensically unmasking the fury and pain of real grief and the vast spectrum of emotions rendered by the AIDS epidemic. It is an album that looks you square in the eye, pins you against a wall and makes you look at and feel the horror the virus visited upon a person, the knowledge of certain death in a hostile environment, and the hypocrisy of those who claim to be Samaritans or protectors. The album twists gospel spirituals into blistering indictments of hypocrisy, using sacred forms to expose the cruelty of churches that damned AIDS sufferers as cursed by God. From the siren-call of "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" through "Double-Barrel Prayer," "Birds of Death," and the title track, she intones as apostate, reaper, and bar-room brawler, detourning spirituals into prayers to a god invented by despair. Begun in 1984 and haunted by her brother's death in 1986, the trilogy moved from anguish to political knowledge, shaped by America's mounting AIDS epidemic - by 1988 over 46,000 dead, antivirals still years away. Dismissed as "the AIDS lady" and joining Act Up protests, Galás made the trilogy a work "begun in 1984 and not completed until the end of the epidemic," refusing closure: for her there is no escape or reprieve. You Must Be Certain of the Devil spears you in the eternal present of trauma, by an artist who calls herself a "Greek orthodox atheist": a person certain of the devil with no hope in God. Packaged in a gatefolf sleeve with euro inner sleeve and poster, with remastered audio by Heba Kadry, vinyl lacquers cut by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering and photography by Emily Andersen.