by Kurt Orzeck
Drop the needle on Snooper’s Worldwide, and you’ll be so sure your record player has a defect that you’ll bolt to the pawn shop to trade it in. Alas, you’d be foolhardy to do so, as Nashville post-punks Snooper appear to revel in challenging themselves to make music juuust a smidgen removed from Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas songs. (Funnily enough, mistyping “Snooper” as “Scooter” will direct you to videos by a German techno band that does, in fact, feature high-pitched chirping reminiscent of a woodland creature.) None of this is to suggest, however, that Snooper has anything in common with kids’ cartoons; there’s a very fine line between high art and low-brow goofiness. That’s how the cliché goes, right? And to contract a contradictory statement, the band does, indeed, have a batty sense of humor.
Snooper have all the support they need to be taken seriously, with Third Man serving as chaperone for the band and its second record, as Jack White’s label did with their first two years ago. That said, the operators of the label appear to have removed the training wheels from Snooper’s bike this time around, letting them embrace their id on the band’s second record in defiance of the dreaded-slash-silly “sophomore curse.”
The band, led by singer Blair Tramel and guitarist Connor Cummin, appear to have ditched the suspiciously pretentious original spelling of their band name, Snõõper, losing the tildes that make no sense to anyone trying to translate their name into Spanish. However, they do stand by their affiliation with the “egg punk” set, a strain of no wave satirically shaped in the first place by Devo. While Snooper may not play dress-up like Devo did, peek at their seizure-inducing, maximally ADD-sourced website to get the drift of the band. (If you can explore the site without immediately tapping out, be sure to click the Toys, Puppets and Video Games tabs in the nav bar.)
Prankish accoutrements aside, Snooper resembles Pee-wee Herman in punk-rock form on Worldwide; they take themselves far less seriously than Les Savy Fav, which is saying a lot. But they never let their hyperactive, mentally disturbed approach to making music a potential source of headaches, like the geniuses in Brainiac were wont to do because no one ever reined them in. Like that latter band’s Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, Worldwide documents Snooper’s arty, seemingly stream-of-conscious chaos. And yet, its brilliance lies not in the being weird for the sake of being weird, but somehow imbuing their rapid-fire, ping-ponging music instincts with a danceability factor on almost every one of Worldwide’s 12 tracks.
The electronics-heavy “Star *69,” the title track, and “Pom Pom” accentuate the band’s uncanny talent in this regard. They kept their punk cred intact with dizzyingly peripatetic “On Line,” “Blockhead,” and “Hologram.” Snooper throw an audacious curveball with a riotous cover of the Beatles’ “Come Together,” and make a case for their radio-friendly appeal on “Guard Dog.” While the album-closing “Subdivision” finds them experimenting with expansive, distortion-drenched experimentalism, they spend the rest of Worldwide jumping up and down in a kids’ bouncy-house filled with colorful pit balls.
Tramel’s lyrical themes mostly revolve around her frustrations with the inundation, infiltration, and inescapable intrusion of technological “advancements” that many of us never asked for: cell phones pinging just for the sake of subjecting consumers to aggravating advertisements, the seeming impossibility of being able to end spam texts (as she astutely describes on “Opt Out”), and emergency hotlines that defeat their own purpose by putting callers on hold or making them suffer through menu selections (“Star 6 9”). But Tramel’s opening lines on “Subdivision” transparently sum up why she’s got a bee in her bonnet: “To avoid citation / You meet every expectation / Only know what to do / If they're always watching you / Everybody knows each other / Live next door to big brother.”
Ladies and germs, welcome to punk-rock in the year 2025.