Tristesse des Mânes
Tristesse, as you may recall from the high school French classes you managed to stay awake for, means "sadness." But mânes? A quick-and-dirty check of the nearest online French-English dictionary yielded rien. (That's French for bupkus.) So I turned to my old friend Wikipedia, and sacré bleu! There's an entry for Manes, a Latin term from Roman mythology that's defined as the souls of deceased loved ones.Now it all makes sense, my dear Watson: "The Sadness of Deceased Souls."
At least that's the translation I'm going with.
In any case, this album was sort of a return to form for CDAA. That is to say, they abandoned (temporarily) their more-recent rockin' style and went back to making the strings-soaked, terribly sad chamber music they started out with back in the late '80s and early '90s. In fact, they revisit a bunch of those old songs here, creating classical "remixes" that strengthen the original compositions.
I know, I know--French chamber music. Almost as pretentious as Elijah's Mantle, for Christ's sake. But the effect is strikingly beautiful, and even though I like both aspects of CDAA'a music, the older, more classically oriented material was distinctive in a way their later work wasn't. So there. Stick that in your crêpe and eat it.
Also today:
58:40 Data-Bank-A, Brotherly Love
58:40 Pygmy Children, Malignant
58:40 Signal 12, Signal 12
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