Pop Music Review : Galas, Jones Take a Sonic Look at Romantic Obsession

“I’m very disappointed in you, and I don’t handle disappointment well. . . .”

Those words, which came early in Diamanda Galas and John Paul Jones’ Wadsworth Theater concert on Sunday, are among the last you’d want to be on the receiving end of. They’re addressed to a husband who might understandably wish to be on his way, but can find no escape from this implacable bride and the claustrophobic sonic prison.

Galas, long a key force in the world of avant-garde music, has swooped down like an avenging angel from the realm of high art into the hard ground of rock ‘n’ roll, hooking up with Led Zeppelin co-founder Jones and bringing her astonishing, opera-from-hell vocal technique to bear on themes of romantic obsession.

Their collaborative album is “The Sporting Life,” a collection of what they call “homicidal love songs.” The battle of the sexes doesn’t get much bloodier than it does in the course of its 10 songs.

A vision this relentlessly pure and individual makes everything else seem like playtime, and in moving to the pop-music stage on Sunday Galas didn’t loosen the fundamental rigor of her art. She did adopt the stances and duds of the rock performer, though, and she capitalized on the form’s immediacy and the songs’ relative accessibility.

It wasn’t as profoundly moving and constantly compelling as the theatrical “Plague Mass” she mounted last year, but it was fun to hear her deliver monologues with the cadences of a soul singer’s sassy spoken interludes. Her serrated timbre often tightened into a voice much like Tina Turner’s, and R&B;’s gliding vocal embellishments were child’s play to a singer with her control.

Jones, who produced the album and co-wrote some of the songs, looked placid and bemused as he hung back and thunked away on a variety of basses, locking in with drummer Denny Fongheiser for an elemental and inevitably Zeppelinesque foundation--especially on the encore, Zep’s “Communication Breakdown.”

It’s amazing how much music this configuration emitted. But there’s no need for a lead guitarist when there’s a veritable Jimmy Page in the singer’s throat.