Opening with a salvo of strings, it dives into a Black Midi-style, funky groove, rendering “Man proposes, God disposes” into a proggy version of The Horrors’ “Excellent Choice” married to Ludus’ “Unveiled (A Woman’s Travelogue)”. It certainly lacks a bit of ‘pigfuck’, if you ask me. The new Sprain, which I from here on out shall refer to as The Lamb (as I really don’t give a toss for long album titles), indulges in a myriad of genres, styles and expressions, leaning towards prog, zolo, drone, post-punk, noise- and post-rock. I guess this is a good excuse why it took me 500 words to get to a simple statement: bad abstract art isn’t “non art”, it’s just a documentation of skill vs.
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So what has any of this got to do with Sprain‘s second full length, The Lamb as Effigy? Well, it’s a complex eight-song work, with Robert Longo via René Magritte inspired artwork, that ends up at 96 minutes, expands with a myriad of religious images and sports the full title The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty XOXOXOS For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine.
In BRMC’s defence, their album is a cool experiment that just isn’t too complex and in the end was offered for free, whereas bad abstract art usually disclaims grand statements and sometimes costs thousands of dollars – which leads to many fun reflections, such as this experiment documented in video form. But on the other end of this is an artist whose knowledge of the process collapses under a grand ambition which ultimately stresses his abilities too much, resulting in… well, I would have said Metal Machine Music, but it’s a pretty cool album, so let’s go with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s The Effects of 333, an even cooler album that saw the band experiment with noise and dark ambient stylings – at times succeeding, other times just ending up swallowing more than they could chew, coming across like somewhat muted Ramleh or leftover Dome.
Like the amateur who smears colours over the whole canvas and drops sprinkles on top, and maybe some text in a corner, just overloading something by demanding too much of the process. What this charade shows is that bad abstract art often seems defined by an imbalance in either of these directions. Because again: the writer of this piece tried to overstate an aspect that is, simply, emotions put into words, but aimed for too grand language and made something simple into some form of complex construct that, in the end, swallowed up any blank space. They choose a modus to say how they feel in response to the outside world. Ok, that sounds pretentious and art-schooly… hold on: But these are works by well-trained masters, whose formalism stems from study and understanding a topic they try to express as directly as possible – so creating a thesis where their use of elements ultimately reflects gut reaction to perceptions that lead to strong engagement.
Hence, no jpeg can ever replicate or explain the striking glow of Jean Miro’s blue tryptich and no review can encompass the nuclear holocaust horror compositions of This Heat’s Deceit. All abstract art starts with an idea of a somewhat diffuse aesthetic aura, but when we interact with the work as audience, it quickly becomes a genuine emotional experience that can outlast the physical quality present. The issue with creating abstract art isn’t so much that you can just dump anything on a blank space and declare it as meaningful and successful – it’s in finding the right balance between aesthetic vitality and emotional expression.
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