It’s so naïve, to remaster and rerelease an album twenty years or so after it was made and still expect that it will hold any resonance beyond its nostalgic value. And that goes triple for electronic music. With a virtual technological arms race now in place, how could anything pre Internet, hell pre smart phone expect to make any sense to us nowadays? After all we’ve evolved – we now have Ipads.
Yet strangely enough time has given Lies Inc compound interest, or a double-edged resonance, by demonstrating not just how little has changed, but how much the messages have intensified. So in some sense Lies Inc is naïve in that it wasn’ able to predict how the corporate messages to manipulate consumption have not just continued but run rampant. After all Lies Inc existed in that innocent time, you know before corporate American greed and the credit bubble brought down the entire global economy. Cue wide-eyed nostalgia for the good old days.
There’ something about retrospective futurism, about cutting edge electronic music viewed through the unique prism of 20 years in the future. The irony is that when this was made it was a doom laden paranoid missive from the fringes of electronic music. Today it’s a unique hybrid of electronic pop and electronica, which thanks to the increasing synthetic nature of popular music, could almost exist within that realm. Though probably not, some of the more industrial elements are a little too much for commercial ears as is the anti corporate speak, then there’ the fact that this is imaginative and frequently compelling music that stands on its own. There’ an abundance of samples, something that the band would move away from in their later work, but this mix gathers voice over’ from public safety announcements or movies, you know the type, telling you to remain calm and switch on your TV. There’ high energy squeaky electronics, and grooves that could exist on the dance floor, with funky bass lines and break beats. Over the top, the one consistent member of the group over the last 20 years, Dave Thrussell offers the caustic sneering vocals of a burnt out electro folk singer pushed too far.
The messages are nothing new, the fascism of state corporate control and the mindless of the consumerist culture had been done to death in industrial music, even by the time this record was released. But Snog was part of a wave of kindler gentler post electro industrial practitioners keen to ensure the message was not just heard above the noise and madness, but also by more than just the converted. Hence the hit song Corporate Slave, that begins with “there is no America, there is no democracy,†on repeat, before the beat kicks in, evolving into a sauntering hip shaking electro groove and Thrussell starts singing about being a hard working corporate slave. It’s Industrial pop and it’s infectiously effective, on an album that simultaneously offers both misty eyed electro nostalgia and messages that are more relevant today than when they were originally written.
