Symphonies of Salvation

I grew up as a person (I got into it at my late teens, so my physical growth was mainly done) as part of the punk-HxC scene. On the music side, I enjoyed most of its different subgenres, with particular interest first in GrindCore and then in Crust, Screamo and its different derivates/hybridations. On the social/political one, it greatly helped to shape the person that I am now (from my critical/questioning attitude to my food habits). Around 2003 I began to grow disenchanted with many of its social/political aspects, and that disillusionment moved me away from the music styles themselves. I started to dive into pretty different sounds, like extreme electronics, post-metal, post-rock and more and more social rap.

In the last months I've gone through quite a lot of personal stuff, and somehow I've ended back into many of those bands that were so important to me in the late 90's, and they've helped me a lot, as they had done at that time. I've also been discovering many new bands, their "successors" we could say, but that will be the topic for another post. I've got hooked again with 90's French screamo, mainly Ananda, Undone and Anomie (I absolutely recommend these amazing posts giving a so complete retrospective of that scene. As it had happened 20 years ago, walking along that path of emotional, intense French sounds necessarily led me again to its dark reflection to the other side of the Atlantic, those Canadian bands that explored the darkest boundaries of the genre, Union of Uranus and One Eyed God Prophecy (Drift do also deserve a special mention). It's hard to explain to what extent the person that I was in my early twenties got trapped into the magic sounds of One Eyed God Prophecy, and it's been beautiful to see how the so similar and so different person that I'm now in my early forties has got mesmerised again by those same sounds. Life is a constant battle against different enemies, and bands like this give me now the strength that they gave me in the past, some medicines never expire.

In the late 90's we were not exposed to the overdose of information that universal access to internet has made possible, and at that time I hardly had any data about OEGP. Searching information about them I've felt quite surprised when seeing that not much has been put up about them (or Uranus) in these 2 decades... which is due to the rather shocking fact that they are not considered a particularly cult/foundational band by good part of the current screamo scene. It seems really odd to me, and it's funny to read this interview to Orchid (a later band seen by many as a cult band) stating We were obsessed with One Eyed God Prophecy and all the Per Koro bands and were trying our hardest to rip them off.

This said, I've come across an amazing 3 pieces retrospective about Acme, Uranus and One Eyed God Prophecy. The choice of these 3 bands as the major representatives of new HxC punk sounds that would continue to grow and evolve over the next 2 decades all over the planet is really appropiate. However, I have to say that though I love Acme and I still get goose bumps in the rare occasions when I listen to their 7", I would have chosen another band to accompany Uranus and OEGP in that podium, maybe His Hero is Gone.