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SNOB has snarled around the local London scene since 2014, leaving a trail of two self-released 7 inches and adulation in their wake. It’s now the year 2018, and SNOB finally bring us their fully fledged follow up of tense hardcore punk that’s characterised by frantic snotty dictation, agitated guitar lines and pummelling rhythms. The ten songs on the self-titled 12” are filled with disparities – sneering hi-energy, sentient meat and potato, adroit silliness, agitated apathy – creating a bleak and angry sonic force. The whip-smart whip-short lyrics are almost a poetry-to-arms that rails against all of the absurdities of modern living. To these ears, SNOB is like if you left YouTube tabs of ICONS OF FILTH, PENI, NOG WATT and JETSET/ BLOEBAD all playing at once, and it somehow sounded wonderful.
The LP comes in a heavy board sleeve designed by the exiled Ben Fordree while on the run in Australia and includes a lyric sheet to help you sing along to modern classics like Doctor Dildo, Lycra Daddy or Punisher.
Our take: After a couple of outstanding 7”s, here’s the debut 12”er from London punks Snob. It’s funny, I generally expect bands to get more complex and spread out a little when they move from small vinyl to large, but Snob seem instead to have streamlined things, making their music even more direct and concise. The lyrics remain a highlight and they’re as confrontational as ever. Lyrically, the most intriguing songs (at least in my opinion) take buzzwords like “consent” and “ally” and examine how the concepts behind them play out in an actual person’s life. In both of those cases, the enlightened political attitudes that are supposed to be part and parcel of using these buzzwords is just a fiction that allows people to continue to disrespect and dehumanize one another behind the shield of political correctness… or at least that’s how I read it. Musically, the noisiness and looseness of Snob’s 7” recordings is largely gone, replaced by a locked-in, metronome-steady rhythm that significantly changes the overall character of the band’s music. While Snob sounded animalistic and uncontained on the 7”s, here they sound disciplined, even mechanical, an impression that is accentuated by the much clearer recording. It’s a slightly different Snob, for sure, they remain just as worthy of your attention.