Listening to The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty XOXOXOS For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine is like sonically inhabiting Dante’s Inferno and stepping into a new circle of Hell along the way. Even then, that may be all too much of a pedestrian way of describing the sophomore follow-up from the Los Angeles experimental noise rock four-piece of vocalist Alex Kent, bassist April Gerloff, guitarist Sylvie Simmons, and percussionist Clint Dodson, as impressing the limits of unorthodox ambition has always been at the forefront of their creative process. This includes even when everything from 2018’s eponymous EP to 2020’s debut full-length, As Lost Through Collision, did so in a minimalistic frame which required an attention span for detail admiration and silent spaces between the explosions. There’s a much greater demand here than even that, with the LP surpassing the 90-minute mark across eight tracks, none which dip below four-minutes and one towering up to 24 in length. That it almost destroyed the band for good is evidence of the artist being consumed beyond healthy limitations than most, though it fits their motif of the noise of humanity — corrosive, disruptive, elegiac, epiphanic, seriously satirical all at once — moving through instrumentation that grazes most closely to, if anyone, Unwound’s late era artistic post-hardcore renderings, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s existentialist post-rock collages, Lingua Ignota’s terrifying religiosity as well as the general fuckery of Xiu Xiu. Their own stage set for theatrical zest and captive orchestration led by Kent’s maniacal word-packed recitations makes the listen altogether without match. In searching for Heaven, many will likely find themselves here where paths are ever-winding and full of collapse, until they begin all over again. It’s the definition of insanity — an apt portrait in sound of a place designed for all those Sprain sees fit to mentally torture for the entertainment of a god nonbenevolent, and the listeners of a certain discerning artistic masochism for noisy art who praise it.

Highlights: “Man Proposes, God Disposes”, “We Think So Ill of You”, “God, or Whatever You Call It”

Sprain’s The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty XOXOXOS For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine will be released September 1st on The Flenser.

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