Album Review: Snog - Babes In Consumerland

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's 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 crafted 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 incorporation of society, the branding of the world, our subservience to the almighty dollar that gets Snog's goat. You might know David Thrussell from his soundtrack to The Hard Word or from his work in Black Lung. He's the one original member of Snog, and if his press release is to be 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 yet the music is provocative, and like most insidious pop could very well have you singing along.