Album Review | Sprain’s The Lamb As Effigy

by Zack Rodick

Sprain’s The Lamb as Effigy, or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOs for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine is a winding, sprawling, noise-rock slash post-rock masterpiece about the flailing of all human creatures in our interactions with other people, the insignificance of human concerns, the dwarfing in magnitude of human experience in comparison to the divine—whatever that may be, however divine it may be—and the performative games we play with ourselves and others to lend ourselves a false sense of control that we believe to be true. It’s ultimately an extremely pessimistic and nihilistic album, lyrically, and that may be something that turns a lot of people off from it. However, despite my reservations concerning some of the implicit philosophical claims lurking through this album, I think what wanted to be articulated was articulated near-perfectly by Alex Kent, the main vocalist, and the other musicians through the lyrics and the instrumentation.

The tracks “Man Proposes, God Disposes,” “Reiterations,” and “We Think so Ill of You” hit the listener with a barrage of feedback, pounding drums, feverous and frantic guitar riffs, and manically delivered musings and ramblings on human failure, personal failure, sexual failure, and universal insignificance. “Margin for Error,” the first of two 24-minute songs on the album, meanders on a droning piano chord while Kent sings more about strained human connection, the opposition or antagonism between humans and the divine cosmos, and sexual shortcomings. The instrumentation builds and swells, and by the end of it you are ensnared in something much bigger, more powerful, more cacophonous than you could have ever believed possible. The first of the sister songs, “The Commercial Nude,” describes a sexual encounter between the singer and an unidentified other person, an encounter in which Kent is on his knees as the other places their hands over his face before they are bent “into a functional display of love” by “an ambassador of hyperbole” in the air. Possibly this “ambassador” is some sort of divine, spiritual entity controlling a sexual encounter between humans; it’s almost as though Kent is arguing that sex itself is performative.

“The Reclining Nude” focuses more on self-loathing, with Kent describing early in the song that he keeps repeating the word idiot to himself until it loses all meaning before ending the song by actually repeating the word idiot in a strained falsetto. The final song on the album, “God, or Whatever You Call It,” is what I can only describe as an art-performance musical masterpiece that puts a misshapen, deformed bow on something that is much more haunting, melancholy, and abyssal. It even has a dialogue/monologue at the end between the titular lamb and Kent performed by Kent himself. The lamb’s lines, when they are actually spoken by the lamb, are just lines on the lyric sheet, and the music reflects it with harsh, suffocating feedback noise. The final resolve to this magnum opus is one of the most gratifying, emotionally charged, and beautiful musical moments I have heard in my entire life.

This album may not be for everyone, but I think it is about everyone in the sense that the self-doubt, the human failings, the philosophical nihilism, and the sexual mis-encounters strewn throughout say something deeply resonant to me about what it is to be human, about what it is to describe myself as human to myself and to other people.