by Anna Solomon (@chateau.fiasco)
Los Angeles’s Sprain put out their debut album As Lost Through Collision in September of 2020, a bleak and grinding affair that mostly consisted of angular riffs, crawling tempos, and walls of feedback, with two out of five songs breaking the ten-minute mark. While the pandemic kept them from touring it upon its release, it still accumulated some hype, certainly due in part to it being the perfect album for lying around in lock down, for me in my freshman dorm on one of many gloomy days where I talked to no one. As restrictions have eased, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Alex Kent, bassist April Gerloff, guitarist Sylvie Simmons, and percussionist Clint Dodson have toured the West Coast and Central US with labelmates such as Drowse, Midwife, and Agriculture, all the while working on their follow-up The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS For a Spark Union With My Darling Divine, which is due out September 1st via The Flenser. Alex Kent talked to me about the album and the process behind it.
photo credit: Tanner Lemoine
The first thing to notice about The Lamb as Effigy is its runtime of 97 minutes, more than twice their debut album. Kent says that it wasn’t necessarily the band’s intention to make the album this long, but rather that they didn’t want to limit themselves in any step of the process and this is what came about. Regarding their debut, Kent says that it “felt like there were more time restrictions. I was always cutting myself down a little bit, like ‘oh, we shouldn't do like this too long, we shouldn't do it.’” This mindset fortunately applies not only to the length of The Lamb as Effigy, but the variety of sounds and approaches on it. For one, Kent is credited on seventeen different instruments, ranging from more common ones like guitar, piano, and organ, but also hammer dulcimer, harmonium, and singing saw.
Perhaps more importantly, Kent says he finds it frustrating when albums end up with only a few long songs on them, since “there can only be like so many flavors in a single track before it becomes kind of gratuitous or gimmicky.” So, to make sure the record was colorful and diverse, the band recorded eight songs, ranging from four to 24 minutes. “Reiterations” continues with the Unwound-esque lurch heard on As Lost Through Collision, hence its somewhat self-deprecating name, whereas “Margin for Error” swells and sprawls and swells like a Godspeed You! Black Emperor piece. “Privilege of Being” and “The Commercial Nude” are sound collages as much as they are songs, both incorporating some of the album’s most tranquil acoustic guitar textures along with its harshest wails of noise and feedback.
As a vocalist and lyricist, Kent made it a point to push himself harder this time around. He still has his angry talk-singing, reminiscent of early post-hardcore, but he experiments with a much more theatrical delivery in moments. Fans of falsetto will be pleased. While he says there was no impetus going in to write wordier songs, in getting out of his own way and letting the music take him where it takes him, he ended up with much more to say. Kent is hesitant to go into details behind the meaning of any of his lyrics, not wanting to over explain or take away any mystery. There’s certainly no obvious way to interpret his explorations of shame, guilt, and humiliation, strung through by often absurd scenes of animals, laughing crowds, and violent country-western stars. His words and delivery, which ranges from frantic to near operatic, always serve to heighten the music which is already in a near-constant state of tension.
While Kent is the primary driver behind Sprain’s work, he makes it a point to speak very highly of all his bandmates and their contributions. Kent founded Sprain with Gerloff back in 2018, and Simmons has been with the band since not long after, in addition to playing with Kent on prior projects. Kent consistently stresses that even as the driving force, the other members’ personalities come through to “keep the music diverse and interesting.”
The guitar chemistry between Kent and Simmons was a large part of what made As Lost Through Collision so great, and while the guitar often takes a backseat here, given the much broader instrumental palette, it’s far from absent. Much of closer “God, or Whatever You Call It” is derived from a recorded improvisation between the Kent and Simmons. The playing between them is kinetic, managing at times to simultaneously feel like pure noise and yet somehow harmonious. Even on more measured moments, the guitar arrangements always sound carefully considered to get as much out of just two instruments as possible, whether it be on interlocking arpeggios or throbbing cluster chords.
The Lamb as Effigy is the band’s first recording with percussionist Clint Dodson, who joined the band fairly abruptly after Max Pretzker was unable to record. All the songs that were already in progress ended up being reworked to fit Dodson’s style. The band didn’t audition anyone else after playing with Dodson, which Kent admits was a risk, but it’s hard to listen to the record and not hear how it paid off. Dodson’s unconventional grooves are heard immediately on opener “Man Proposes, God Disposes,” and his power behind the kit helps make songs like “The Reclining Nude” and “We Think So Ill of You” sound truly colossal.
Regarding “God, or Whatever You Call It” in particular, Kent says that it has what people expect out of a Sprain track “without falling into the tropes and cliches.” This seems like a common worry for him, especially regarding the band’s earlier work, that it’s too close to what people have heard before or would expect to hear from this kind of band. While any fan of noise rock or post-rock will find at least something to enjoy on The Lamb as Effigy, I think the best compliment I can give a good portion of the record, and one that I don’t think I could give any of Sprain’s prior work with full honesty, is that there’s no comparison to another band or style that feels fully apt. Maybe I’m just bad at my job, but for my sake and Sprain’s sake, I’d much rather say that they’ve taken a big step in finding their identity as a band. The Lamb as Effigy, in all its anxious twists and towering crescendos is almost as distinctive as it is ambitious, and it’s really damn ambitious.