Every system of belief needs a soundtrack. It helps turn an idea into a feeling, a feeling into a habit, and a habit into something that can pass for truth without having to endure too much questioning. A melody is particularly useful for this purpose: it slips past the defences that might greet a lecture with suspicion, then stays around long enough to become part of the furniture of memory. Perverts in White Shirts, the Zürich duo of Nathalie Dreier and Dave Phillips, take this deceptively simple mechanism apart on "CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories", a sprawling two-CD collection of repurposed songs, sermons, declarations and devotional fragments. The source material comes partly from the Children of God cult in which Dreier spent her childhood, and partly from other movements whose promises of enlightenment, salvation or belonging have carried less innocent implications. The pair subject these remnants to an unruly mixture of electronic distortion, fractured pop, psychedelic haze, dub-like manipulation and outright sonic sabotage. The music can be catchy, even inviting, but the invitation comes with a distinctly troubling small print.

The album’s 28 tracks frequently begin with something recognisable: a melodic contour, a voice delivering its message with conviction, the suggestion of a chorus that might once have brought a roomful of people together. Then the familiar begins to misbehave. Voices are stretched, submerged, interrupted or made to sound strangely mechanical; fragments of devotional enthusiasm acquire an uncomfortable theatricality; arrangements drift between wonky pop, warped psychedelia and noise without settling into a single stylistic jurisdiction. “What A Wonderful World We Live In” opens with a title whose sunny assurance becomes difficult to accept in this company. “Love Is The Only Weapon” and “Truth” place two reassuring abstractions under suspicion before the record has had much time to establish itself. The title “My Truth Is Better Than Yours” could almost be the slogan of an entire civilisation currently arguing with itself online, although the album’s concerns reach well beyond the internet. These are not merely clever names attached to ironic sound collages. They expose the verbal shortcuts through which certainty can be sold, particularly when the person doing the selling claims to possess exclusive access to the answers.

The unsettling thing is how often the music retains its appeal. Dreier and Phillips understand that the most effective forms of manipulation do not necessarily sound sinister. A sugary tune can carry an ugly proposition; an intimate voice can make domination resemble protection; a collective chorus can transform unquestioning agreement into an apparently joyful occasion. The duo exploit this mismatch rather than simply drowning their source material in noise. Their arrangements can be playful and grotesque at once, with crooked rhythms and oddly seductive melodic remnants keeping the listener involved even as the underlying material becomes harder to stomach. “Come To Mommy” has the ominous implications of a lullaby whose promise of safety deserves closer inspection, while “A Wonderful Bright Rhythm Will Meet Your Needs” sounds like a particularly dubious form of customer service. One almost expects the music to offer a free introductory consultation before explaining that cancellation is not permitted.

Yet mockery alone would be an inadequate response to the material, and the album is more interesting when its humour becomes uneasy. Dreier’s biographical connection to the Children of God means that this is not an abstract exercise in collecting examples of other people’s foolishness. The work involves reclaiming material that may carry the weight of an imposed childhood, while acknowledging that memory does not necessarily obey the neat moral divisions preferred by hindsight. Something once associated with isolation or indoctrination may still retain a melody, a vocal inflection or an emotional residue that cannot simply be dismissed. That residue is precisely where the album operates. The music neither restores the original material to innocence nor allows it to remain untouched by its history. Instead, it puts the listener in the uncomfortable position of recognising the attraction of something whose implications are repellent. There is no need to pretend that every fragment is equally sinister, or that everyone who finds a tune memorable has somehow been compromised by it. The point is that musical pleasure can survive the circumstances in which it was manufactured, sometimes long after the original message has become impossible to defend.

Dave Phillips is well suited to this collision of subject matter and sound. His extensive work in noise and experimental music has explored the physical and psychological effects of abrasive audio, while Perverts in White Shirts gives that sensibility a particularly charged relationship with song and language. Here, distortion is not just a way of making things sound unpleasant. It interferes with the authority of the voice, loosens the connection between a statement and its intended meaning, and makes the act of listening feel less passive. The duo can be caustic without becoming musically monotonous, moving from recognisable song forms to fragmented interludes and passages in which the original material seems to dissolve into its own emotional atmosphere. “Never Forever” and “Trust” offer different kinds of ambiguity, while “I Judge Your Guilts One By One” announces its prosecutorial instincts with an eight-minute duration that gives the accusation room to become something more complicated than a punchline. At other moments, the music sounds like a broadcast from a parallel entertainment industry in which the jingles have survived but the institution responsible for them has become increasingly difficult to trust.

The album’s length is part of its argument, although it is also its most obvious practical challenge. Nearly two hours of material can make even a well-intentioned listener wonder whether the subject might have been adequately established somewhere around the first disc. The shorter tracks help by creating a restless succession of perspectives rather than one continuous wall of unease, but the quantity of material occasionally threatens to blur the distinctions between individual pieces. This is not a work whose every idea needs equal time to make its point. Still, the accumulation has a purpose: the repetitions, changes in tone and recurring vocabulary of love, truth, freedom and salvation begin to resemble the relentless circulation of slogans themselves. One statement may seem absurd in isolation; repeated in different forms, it starts to reveal the machinery that keeps such statements alive. The listener is not simply hearing a collection of strange songs, but experiencing how a set of persuasive gestures can become exhausting through sheer persistence.

Then comes “Shangri-La”, almost 29 minutes long, occupying a disproportionate stretch of the album’s closing movement. Its duration changes the terms of engagement. What might elsewhere be delivered as a concise, unsettling vignette becomes an extended confrontation with the remnants of belief, as vocal fragments and electronic treatments linger beyond the point at which a conventional song would have offered a chorus, a resolution and a polite farewell. The title invokes an imagined sanctuary, a place supposedly removed from ordinary conflict, while the music makes the prospect of such refuge increasingly uncertain. It is an effective ending precisely because it refuses the convenience of a final verdict. After so many compact examples of persuasion and distortion, the extended piece leaves space for the material to become emotionally ambiguous rather than merely illustrative. The listener is allowed to remain uncomfortable, which is not the same thing as being left without a point.

The album’s wider implications are difficult to ignore. Cultic thinking is not confined to isolated religious communities or flamboyant gurus with questionable hair and a talent for filling halls. It can flourish wherever belonging depends on obedience, where doubt is treated as a personal defect, and where an authority figure promises to remove the burden of independent judgement. Contemporary wellness culture, political tribes, online communities and the commercial manufacture of identity all offer their own versions of the bargain, though the differences between them matter and should not be casually erased. Perverts in White Shirts do not need to claim that every form of conviction is equivalent to coercion. Their more unsettling observation is that the mechanisms of persuasion can travel between contexts, retaining their effectiveness even when the vocabulary changes. The promise of unconditional love, the assertion of exclusive truth and the demand for loyalty are not inherently sinister phrases. Their meaning depends on who controls them, what they require in return, and whether the person hearing them is free to walk away.

"CULTurally appropriated songs and revisited memories" is therefore more than a collection of deliberately mangled devotional pop. It is a difficult, darkly funny examination of how ideology attaches itself to the senses, and how the emotional traces of a past can persist beyond the beliefs that once organised them. Dreier and Phillips make no attempt to turn this material into an easy story of escape and recovery, nor do they offer the listener a convenient position of moral superiority. Their music can be absurd, alluring, abrasive and genuinely painful, sometimes within the same piece. The title’s emphasis on revisiting memories is important: what returns is not necessarily what happened in its original form, but what can still be heard, felt and questioned in the present. By the end, the most disturbing discovery is not that a sinister message can be wrapped in a pleasant tune. It is that the tune may remain pleasant even after we understand the message. The difficult work begins when we stop confusing that pleasure with proof.