Across the 96 minutes of The Lamb as Effigy or 300 XOXOXOs for a Spark Union with the Darling Divine, Sprain’s Alexander Kent curls and shrinks and shrivels. He is consumed with guilt the way that a building is consumed with fire. Sometimes he throws it off in a fit of rage or pique, strengthened by the incredible, ugly heaviness his band generates. Sometimes, he cowers in the beneficent presence of the patient, gorgeous drones that hum the album into a temporary state of serenity. But mostly, Kent ruminates in long, uncomfortable, occasionally tedious passages, the urgency of his emotion goading him into singing more than he seems to want to. He strikes out at God and at the titular Lamb, who may or may not be the same being, but every dart he hurls skyward inevitably returns to pierce his head. He is Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, trying to tamp down his anxiety long enough to declare that a criminal’s conscience will inevitably cause him to suffer.
If that makes The Lamb as Effigy sound off-putting, uncomfortable, overwrought, and maybe a little boring, well, so is Dostoevsky. Sprain began as the somnambulant slowcore project of Kent and bassist April Gerloff, a style that suited the apartment setup where they recorded their first EP. They expanded to a quartet for 2020’s harsher As Lost Through Collision, and now, with The Lamb as Effigy, they appear to reject restrictions of any kind—genre, narrative cohesion, and the general principles of how an album should be constructed. But don’t let the pair of 24-minute songs fool you: While Kent’s lyrical vision is sometimes obscured by the steam his frustration generates, The Lamb as Effigy is expertly crafted. It’s symphonic in scope, operatic in delivery, and no wave in attitude.
Sprain have cited the intensely difficult music of Iannis Xenakis as an influence, and you can hear the blood-soaked chaos of the Greek composer’s Persepolis in the abyssal screeches of The Lamb as Effigy’s “Margin for Error.” Throughout the album, rapid streams of noise flood and overwhelm things, bursting the boundaries of traditional post-punk and either carrying the songs into oblivion or allowing them to stagnate in the heat of Kent’s anger. In “Privilege of Being,” unhappy electronics, rusty violins, and woodwinds whistle like suffering birds, their shivers echoed later in the twisted and pulsing guitars of “God, or Whatever You Call It.” These moments are chaotic, but they speak to the band’s ability to develop a musical idea over the (very) long scope of the album. When hollow keyboards phase across the opening of “Margin for Error” like Steve Reich’s Four Organs re-scored for a horror film, it feels like blame being shifted between two people.