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 Gal�s' 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 its 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. Dismissed as "the AIDS lady" and joining Act Up protests, Gal�s made the trilogy a work 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.

• Genre: Pop
• Label: INTRAVENAL SOUND OP