Intensity, Thy Name Is Diamanda Galas

O Lord Jesus, do you think I’ve served my time?

The eight legs of the Devil now are crawling up my spine.

That harrowing image from “Let My People Go,” the adapted gospel song that Diamanda Galas used to open and close her flawed but fascinating 75-minute set at the Palace on Friday, is one good measure of why the new music vocalist’s “The Singer” project is a conceptual masterstroke.

Taking the imagery and emotion of tradition blues or gospel material and filtering it through Galas’ operatic technique and wordless improvisation to articulate the rage and pain of the AIDS plague is a brilliant idea that was largely realized before an enthusiastic crowd.

Her “normal” singing voice had much of the cracked, emotionally ravaged character of the post-”Broken English” Marianne Faithfull. Galas’ banshee wails and occasional lapses into operatic bombast gave each song its share of peaks and valleys but she’s an arresting performer who commands attention. She clearly means everything she sings and her improvising frees the songs to go in any direction at any second.

The weak link was her piano accompaniment--it was often too busy and she repeatedly failed to take advantage of the emotional pull that some simple blues/gospel chord progressions she played could have generated.