La Serpenta Canta aka The Serpent Sings, is a song recital recruiting blues, R&B, Motown, southern soul, Country & Western and her own "Baby's Insane" (from This Sporting Life, her duo album with John Paul Jones) in Galás's ongoing campaign against forgetting.

A highly inventive composer and pianist, Galás's compelling low end piano settings draw on her background in free jazz – overtly acknowledged in La Serpenta Canta's version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" – modern composition and the electronic avant garde. Bonded by Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", which features on both sets, Defixiones and La Serpenta Canta variously illuminate, extend and support each other's ways of grieving. With songs like James Carr's deep soul classic "Dark End Of The Street" (covered earlier on her duo album with John Paul Jones), Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and Screaming Jay Hawkins's "I Put A Spell On You" bookended with John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell", La Serpenta Canta may start in a familiar place but Galás's vocal methods of interrogating the popular memory of such songs examines each word and note from every angle, in the process reinvesting them with the full weight of meaning and emotion that might have been hitherto eroded through familiarity. The Supremes' "My World Is Empty Without You" – which Galás first assayed on her 1998 song cycle Malediction And Prayer – has never before sounded so desolate as in her sounding of its abyssal depths here. The songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland might have conceived it as a lovers' breakup song, but in Galás's reading, "My World Is Empty Without You" serves as a portal to both La Serpenta's darker companion, Defixiones, Will And Testament, and, indeed, the entire canon of mourning music that Galás has amassed since her 1979 international debut in a French staging of composer Globokar's Un Jour Comme Une Autre.
- Biba Kopf