Perth’s Sin Club played host to Snog on Saturday night, and they were clearly enjoying themselves every bit as much as the audience. Snog is David Thrussell’s collage of a multitude of artists, including Peter and Julia Bourke and Tim McGrath, with Thrussell as the glue across their prolific array of releases since 1988.
Touring to promote the latest release, The Last Days of Rome, Thrussell brought out some darkly amusing and pointy gems from the album such as Al-Qaeda Is Your Best Friend, Christmas Every Day and It’s All Lies. He also drew from earlier releases; King of Hate and of course, Corporate Slave (“There is no America, there is no democracy…”). Snog is the Pop wing of Thrussell’s art. Lyrically, it has the effect of crystallising the politics of the music into a single sentence, which can be repeated as a mantra or a protest.
Taking time to have a chat to the audience between songs, Thrussell explained that our underwear had been impregnated with a microchip as we entered the club, which transmitted “sphinctoral resonance” information to the marketing department in California, allowing them to assess the mood of the audience, and modify the performance accordingly. Although he makes a living from the very corporate machine against which he protests, he never takes himself too seriously, maintaining focus on the music and the message rather than the merch.
Sin Club is held in a big old dance studio and is one of the few that fills the dancefloor with smoke and lights, leaving the band on stage in perfect view. Snog began their set at midnight, once the video screen had run several times through its selection of disturbing clips designed to make the punters think, despair, and then give in and just dance harder. Of course, just when the audience got comfortable, Snog changed the BPM, ripping the dancers out of any notion of trance, engaging them, making them find the beat to dance to. Thrussell does the same thing to your mind.
He will be back at Sin on April 26 under the guise of Black Lung: a solo DJ project more focussed on industrial ambient psycho-techno, which still retains the anti-corporate, anti-consumerist philosophy for which Thrussell is so revered.
