Jonny Numb

In my movie reviews, I frequently bemoan the increasingly distended run times of mainstream features (those of the “more is more” spectacle mentality – looking at you, Marvel).

That said, in listening to music through the years, I have become increasingly fascinated by songs that stretch onward and outward, creating unique sonic worlds that sometimes wind up longer in a single track than the whole of some artists’ LPs.

I am nothing if not a pile of contradictions. Music and film are such different mediums, yet I can easily sit through a double album and not be bored, whereas the viewing experience – which takes much more to keep me fully engaged – becomes a sort of punishment when stretched beyond narrative reason.

In listening to the first disc of the Swans’ To Be Kind while out and about recently, I was fascinated by the aural phenomenon at work. That feeling where a song begins and you glance at the time a couple seconds in; and the next time you look, you notice several minutes have passed…the song is still going…and you’re not bored.

Make no mistake: there are pretentious musical acts who craft long songs that are painful to listen to (sometimes by design; sometimes due to a lack of talent and a whole lot of hubris screaming to be acknowledged).

So I thought I would take a trip down Memory Lane…and work my way up to the present in terms of how I initially defined a ‘long song’ and how that perception evolved as my musical taste branched out.

Maybe to start with the obvious: when I first saw the video for Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer,’ I thought it was a very cool visual complement to an extremely catchy song. However, it wasn’t until I picked up The Downward Spiral in ’96 that I realized the video (and the radio version) were edited for content and length. Back then, it was all about ‘playability,’ and how often MTV and FM stations could shove a popular track down listeners’ throats.

(For comparative purposes, the video runs about 1:30 shorter than the song proper.)

A lot of my musical taste was shaped by NIN – a gateway drug into the wider and more obscure catacombs of Industrial music.

Full disclosure: because I was 14 and quite stupid at the time, my first NIN purchase was the Further Down the Spiral remix album (U.S. version), which contains the brilliant, 10-minute ‘Self Destruction, Final’ (reconstructed by Foetus’ J.G. Thirlwell), which I prefer to the original version off of The Downward Spiral. Part of this is due to the way the remixed version keeps building with maddening intensity, whereas ‘Mr. Self Destruct’ reaches its crescendo about 3 minutes in before fading into a minute or so of innocuous burbling that serves as the lead-in the mellower, mournful ‘Piggy.’

And while we’re talking Foetus, ‘Slung’ off Gash is a frankly amazing 11-minute track (that horn section!). The chorus is surprisingly catchy.

When I picked up my second Skinny Puppy album, Last Rights, as part of my 16th birthday haul, I was transfixed by the chaotic and noisy – yet beautiful – instrumental interlude, ‘Riverz End’ (6:40).

Last Rights culminates in another instrumental, ‘Download’ (11:01), which runs even longer and becomes a trippy zone-out track on par with cEvin Key’s work on his titular side project.

After the initial dissolution of Skinny Puppy, I gravitated toward the projects Ogre would lend his distinctive vocal talents to. The earliest I remember picking up was KMFDM’s Symbols, where he guested on “Torture” (7:03).

Speaking of slogans, the album that introduced me to punk was the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist, which was unusual in that it went against the genre norm of songs that struck hard and fast to convey a point. The LP was home to expansive, lyrically involved, and musically audacious tracks that culminated in the Kennedys’ masterful laundry list of complaints and concerns for America, ‘The Stars and Stripes of Corruption’ (6:25). Anthemic to the max, and like all good and timeless art, contains sentiments that still ring true to this day.

Tool was incredibly popular in the mid-’90s, and I saw their T-shirts around my high school in tandem with the likes of NIN, Marilyn Manson and Rage Against the Machine. It honestly took me a while to come around to these guys, mostly because they seemed like a bunch of pretentious art-school wankers. (Who knows – maybe I just reached a point of self-realization where I was able to admit my own pretentious wankery.)

For a while, Aenima was my favorite album of theirs. It’s certainly their most eclectic, toying with styles, tones (lyrical and musical), and expectations from one song to the next. The album closer, ‘Third Eye’ (13:53) opens with a Bill Hicks quote and proceeds through a labyrinthine aural journey propelled by Maynard James Keenan’s alternately screaming and subdued vocals.

To piggyback off ‘Third Eye,’ I like how all-girl metal act Kittie did their own homage to Tool with ‘Pink Lemonade’ (10:37), off their sophomore effort, Oracle.

The reality of being a ’90s teen into NIN and seeking out Trent Reznor’s musical influences was, some of those influences weren’t readily available in legitimate formats. Coil in particular was hard to come by (a former friend managed to acquire their Tainted Love EP from the long-gone Disc Jockey at the York Galleria), and it wasn’t until two decades later that Dais Records began reissuing their albums on vinyl and CD, to great fanfare.

Of the Coil albums I’ve acquired during this renaissance, Time Machines is a particular favorite, carrying the feeling of drifting through an uneasy yet sonically cohesive dreamscape. (Sharing the whole album since it plays better that way, but its 4 epic tracks range in length from 10 to 27 minutes.)

Another band I’ve been late in coming around to is ESA (short for Electronic Substance Abuse). I saw them live once during Toronto’s Aftermath Festival, and possibly another time during the now-defunct Kinetik Festival [citation needed!]. Chalk my disinterest up to timing – when you’re preoccupied with stuff like The Birthday Massacre, “noisy and experimental” is a hard sell.

Perhaps as a happy by-product of getting into Coil, it opened the door for my embrace of ESA’s penchant for long songs that engage with the senses in a manner that doesn’t make them feel long.

I was recently listening to Penance: Themes of Carnal Empowerment 3, and while, like Coil, it’s hard to pick one track to define an album that feels more like one big song than a bunch of little ones, I’ll leave ‘Juju Yako’ (10:35) for your listing pleasure.

While social media continues to descend into a Dante-esque inferno, there are still some positives to being on Facebook or Twitter (fuck off, Elon Buttsk!) – namely, the discovery of new musicians or filmmakers. It’s a win-win when someone starts following you, and when you check out their art, it’s also pretty cool!

So sometimes the algorithm isn’t the enemy.

Case in point: Slighter, whose most recent LP, This Futile Engine is refreshingly varied and unpredictable in its old-meets-new school Industrial songwriting. At almost 12 minutes, ‘Narcodrone’ is the most epic track off this excellent album.

There are times when long songs transport you back to another era. I’ve brought up my teenage years a lot in this post, when listening to the “hidden track” on Green Day’s Dookie over and over again and singing it to your friends was considered the height of comedy. (Though I much prefer the disturbingly funny spoken-word piece at the tail end of ‘Wrath,’ off KMFDM’s Xtort.)

With Caution, Left Spine Down gave listeners one of the best Industrial albums of the 2010s, and the titular closing track offers a song that goes on for roughly 10 minutes before transitioning into a prolonged spoken-word piece about psyops – set against a background of disparate samples and radio static – that stretches things to 32 minutes. It takes the “hidden track” aesthetic and stretches it to its breaking point (and I mean that in the most complimentary manner possible).

To bring things back around to the beginning, here is the Swans’ ‘Bring The Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (34:06), off To Be Kind.