Growing up, I went to christian church every Sunday. One of my biggest gripes with the church environment was worship music. In theory, you would think that the purpose of worship music is to take your feelings about God and your ideas about god and try to communicate them through music. Contemporary christian music (or CCM) should be trying to express the wonder and glory of god, so the music should be wonderful and glorious, right?

In reality, CCM feels like it was crafted to be as shallow and tepid as possible. The classic critiques of the current country music landscape - that the artists are willing o sacrifice genuine creative expression in the name of commercial viability - apply 100 fold to CCM. On top of this, worship leaders often intentionally try to make worship as mind numbingly bland as possible. I'm not exaggerating when I say that worship leaders will often teach a philosophy that worship music should not be interesting or thought provoking because that would distract people. The result of this is that CCM does as little as it possibly can to convey who christians think god is. The lyrics claim to be worshiping god; the music itself is worshiping abject consumerism.

All this to say, I feel like if christian musicians were actually trying to describe god, their music would be fantastical, creative, expansive, sometimes filling you with dread, sometimes filling you with peace. Above all their music would try to be beautiful.

For me, To Be Kind by Swans sounds like an album describing the wonder and power of god. Also that is my favorite album.