Snog – Babes In Consumerland (Omni Corporation)

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Pop music is designed to reinforce the status quo, to be risky and salacious in safe predictable and ultimately meaningless ways that reinforce the message that your job as the consumer is to consume. It’s an insidious tool that works. Though what if it went the other way? Use the tool but flip the script. Melbourne’ Snog make anti pop, or as the liner notes suggest, conspiracy pop.

It’s a slick and smooth production designed to get under your defences, yet the content is designed to provoke, not pacify.
“Worship the man who makes love to the brand/ Pump it if you can with your head in the sand,” They offer caustically in the chorus of Corporate Homoerotic cyclists. It’s the corporation of society, the branding of the world, our subservience to the almighty dollar that gets Snog’ goat.

You might know Dave Thrussell from his soundtrack to The Hard Word or from his work in Black Lung. He’ the one original member of Snog, and if the press release is to believed he now goes under the name Dee and is living as a transgender woman. In fact Snog is now an all female band, with Samantha Sanders, Christine Arkley Smith and of course Dee. They’re joined by an array of guests like Ash Wednesday, John Justin Stewart (Grace Jones), electronic weirdo Felix Kubin, legendary German producer Atom TM, and even the City of Prague Philharmonic choir.

This is very much an electronic album, constructed with a wide variety of synths and drum machines. The humour is black, the references highly literate (there’ a bibliography in the liner notes), and the music though provocative, like most insidious pop music could very well have you singing along.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

1 Comment

  1. Album of the year.
    At a time when so much music (and culture in general) is so astoundingly meaningless, this record shines like a beacon of sanity.
    The ‘Snowden Revelations’ (and so much more) make it clearer every day how prescient, relevant and necessary Snog are.
    Keep it up, we need you.

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