#365songs (72 / 365)

I tried out Swans' huge album The Seer when my favorite music review site named it their #1 album of the year and it didn't really grab me. But the followup To Be Kind? Grabbed the shit out of me, in large part because amid all the lengthy experiments with drawn-out mantric sonic overwhelm it has some more immediate slappers like "Oxygen." Of course "immediate" is a relative term. "Oxygen" is still 8 minutes long, and like a lot of To Be Kind it's basically Michael Gira memorably losing his absolute shit over increasingly cacophonous mayhem — still something only Swans could make, in other words — but this mayhem has an actual beat and a funky distorted bassline rather than being just an undifferentiated wall of sound. Apparently it's about Gira's asthma attacks, which, sure. Certainly a topic that has inspired some notably abrasive music in the past, too.

A little structural thing: I love how, as intense as the first four minutes are, the additional horns and Gira's increasing unhingedness crank it up even further in the B section, which starts at the exact halfway point of the song. For whatever reason, I'm a sucker for midpoints.