2023-10-03 18:53:00
Sprain force for their second studio album The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine actually, as announced, the next level in their rapid evolutionary history.
A consequence that probably won’t affect anyone who follows the band’s path from California from their 2018 slowcore self-titled EP to post-hardcore As Lost Through Collision (2020) may actually come as a surprise: The Lamb as Effigy is, so to speak, the progression of its predecessor, radicalized into avant-garde, post punk and noise rock bastard, more experimentally structured and underlining the penchant for megalomania in dimensions for which Swans are probably the most ubiquitous association, because eight songs are dominated by two monoliths of almost 25 minutes each over almost an hour and a half of playing time.
Is that pretentious or uncompromising?; complacent or devoted?; draining or fulfilling?; primarily material or ultimately attitude?; too elaborate or just measuring the appropriate volume?; Yes!
In front of his band and their helpers, board member Alexander Kent stands at the pulpit with an immense presence, is smart enough to set off this massive chunk in an emphatically impulsive and immediate way – i.e. to immediately create a compelling momentum.
Man Proposes, God Disposes From the overture in the orchestra pit, it soon finds its way into the stoic reciting groove, into a manic, cacophonous stream of feverish litany and virulent guitar chicanery over the rhythmic stringency, practices endurance and changeability in an uncomfortable madness, quirky art and yes, of course too headed before the stream merges seamlessly into Reiterations transforms. Kent whimpers near Black Country, New Road suffering, but mortifying with a far more radical agony. Sprain strolling crookedly through a broken grandezza Ashenspire roaring, flirting with a symphonic nightmare in the arrangements before Privilege of Being The first segment of the album ends as if a classically plucked guitar wave were dialing into a folkloric horror trance via a modem from distortion hell, the strings of which suggest sublime beauty but do not concretize it. Unwound, Slant, OxbowNick Cave…they all left their mark on this amalgam.
You will then be enthroned on this pedestal Margin for Errorthe heart and showpiece of The Lamb as Effigy, on a long, sacred organ carpet that mutates into a shimmering ambient lament. Kent laments like Scott Walker, and how epochal and densely engulfing this grandiose sea swells in its gravity as it progresses is one of the best, most hypnotic and intense things that has happened to the tension between drone and post-rock in a long time.
The next passage: The Commercial Nude is inspired by 70s minimalism and gamelan music, swims free from a whining tangle of cables into a chamber music-tingling dream beyond Will Sheff, fights in the slipstream of Unknown language – and back again to the ghostly jazzy piano ballad. Hikes there The Reclining Nude, sort of as if Matt Bellamy had thrown away any sense of digestibility in theatrical melodrama. That Sprain At some point, forcing yourself to stop and take a deep, melancholic breath ensures that The Lamb as Effigy Here, for once, it doesn’t represent a challenge that requires a show of strength in accommodating, but instead gives a gentle hug – only for the nasty feedback to push We Think So Ill of You harassed, where the panic from Paper Chase with the anti-social hysteria of Chat Pile gets infected.
That The Lamb As Effigy Regardless of his references, however, it is always less of a jack-of-all-trades than a polarizing source of friction should come as no surprise. Not that either Sprain even ultimately attack the potential benevolence and cut the abstract complexity of their almost spiritual-essentialist, nihilistic-depressive Moloch, which rambles on as if in an improvised jam frenzy, with harsh passion in the exchange of energy in the finale, so much so that the nerves are on edge.
The Ought‘esque beginning banter God, or Whatever You Call It sands itself up where the songwriting has long since been freed of form and structure, swirls up in short bursts of tirades. I like playing the guitar Televisionyes, but Michael Gira and his Filth even more. Just revise Sprain their plans for the middle anyway without further ado, the network blossoms anew in dystopian barrenness, in sedative lethargy – no matter how much the alarm bells are eaten by viruses, an army of scratching balloons scream in circles, or the drones/Springtime aesthetic like a conjuring, vibrating flagellation maltreat: through the breathing exercise of a swallowed pain there will be no conventionally discharging, no satisfying climax as an attitude of refusal.
Instead, Kent first leaves and then returns desperate and burnt out, struggling with his inner bastard, stylistically not that far removed from the alleged tormentor Alexis Marshall, in order to actually let himself and the sound monster slide into a short, astral score collage, and thus close the circle. It’s quite possible that this is the case, with a little distance – if the impression is that The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine a little too trendy, possibly faded – even in those masterpiece spheres Sprain here undeniably (just sometimes exaggerated in meaning).
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