MISTREMENDUM

The visual impact of the album cover comes first. It's. I suppose, a shot of the explosion of the shuttle Columbia, but it looks like a sort of big Angel of Death. Mistremendum is a word which appears in a christian book of 1602. All the track titles have something mystic: Boginya (track 6) in Russian means "Goddess", "Null Dies Sine Linea" is a sentence taken from the latin "Plinius the Old", so it seems that the concept behind resides in ancient books.

This is an unusually calm and melodic album for Senmuth. Dark as usual but with very few percussion. All the tracks are quite short. The whole album scores few more than 30 minutes and some are faded out in the final. Tremendum, which closes the album is a real highlight. Its melody is more consistent than usual. Who is familiar with Senmuth knows that the purpose of the music consists mainly in setting a mood, like an attempt to describe a place, a situation or whatever he wants using only the sensations provided by the music, and melody isn't very relevant in this environment. Mistremendum, instead has a very good balance between the exigence of dramaticity and the melody. The alternance of hard and slow parts doesn't cause any disturb. I just don't like the fading out at the end.

So, despite its shortness, this is a good album, good also for who approaches Senmuth for the first time.