The Actual Honest-To-Goodness Best Damn Album Of The Year

The Seer by Swans

This is the year I finally “got” Swans.  Numerous people have told me I should dig into them in years past, and I always took a stab at it, but never quite got there.  Then The Seer happened.  It’s a Swans album definitely, maybe THE Swans album, the culmination of all of Michael Gira’s obsessions with death and god and sex and all of it, smashed into one big 2 hour long sprawling not-mess of an album.  The almost-Broadway chorus of “Lunacy” into the brutal breathing of “Mother of the World”.  This title track (honestly an album on its own) that bleeds into the disintegration of “93 Ave. Blues”.  The Karen O-sung disc 2 opener “Song for a Warrior” that almost makes me tear up.  The bells of  “Apostate” leading into its closing percussive fury.  The whole album just comes together as the sound of some kind of furious love for the world.