Snog – Dear Valued Customer – Review

Snog

Dear Valued Customer (Machinery)
by Joe Hacking

Lillian Hellman said that cynicism is just a difficult way of seeing the truth. It’s safe to say that Australian doom industrialists Snog would agree. Their new release, Dear Valued Customer (Machinery), is brimming over with harsh truths and cruel, inhuman music. They vilify Western Civilization by capturing its essence within dirgic anthems.

“This world spins but not for you/And all their lies have become true,” intones vocalist David Thrussel on “Dear Valued Customer.” These Australians are about as cheery as the morticians of a consumption-driven, brain-dead society could be.

Like early Yes, Snog creates soundscapes, but where Yes paint beautiful, organic landscapes, Snog creates the digitized towers and canyons of machine domination. Translation: You’re just a jacked-in techno-junky monkey, boys and girls. The audio clips sound like desperate communications from the 1950s, warning us about something we think we’ve already solved. Dreariness pours from this disc like booze down a politician’s throat.

Snog call themselves cynical-groove-electro, the press kit calls them avant garde industrial wave. But I call the work of composers Thrussel and keyboardist Julia Bourke refreshingly un-naive.