Salvation

Firmly at the forefront of the progressive rock and metal scenes for nearly three decades now and one of modern rock’s acclaimed live acts, Sweden’s Pain of Salvation return with the follow-up studio album release to 2017’s acclaimed “In The Passing Light Of Day”. And PANTHER, which was mixed with Daniel Bergstrand (In Flames, Meshuggah, Devin Townsend) and comes with a comprehensive artwork-theme with illustrations made by André Meister, is once again a triumph for artistic imagination and an exhilarating new chapter in the life of Pain of Salvation: Intense, ever innovative and highly relevant.

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.