20 May 2021

THE SYMPHONY



I wrote at length about THE SYMPHONY's arrival in Norman, Oklahoma when I posted the Indian Clayton's Brown Dog Backyard Habitat tape in The Escape's infancy, but I figure every unknown band deserves to be discussed at least once a decade....no? They were from Ardmore, Oklahoma, and they appeared one autumn (probably 1991?) as classes ramped up, and they just seemed so serious and so generally legit to my little crew of weirdos and dorks. They were also really fucking good. I'm going to make an analogy that is going to sound completely off, but please hear me out.....THE SYMPHONY were to Oklahoma college town grunge/punk what DEAD AND GONE were to Bay Area hardcore. This is to say that we (the "rest" of us) basically got what they were doing, but they were light years ahead of us. The way they wrote songs and approached songwriting, they way they owned their influences and used them as fuel - influences that put them in league with the bands who influenced the bands who influenced bands that we liked - and I still hear all of that when I listen to this tape today. This thirty year old tape. 




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