It would never be enough for Wikileaks to be a whistleblowing website that infuriated the US and other governments by spilling the beans about activities they didn't want the world to hear. We've had the Wikileaks TV show (The World Tomorrow), the social network (Friends of Wikleaks). Now comes Beat the Blockade. Yes, the Wikileaks album.

Wikileaks' venture into pop music is ostensibly to raise money to keep the website's quest for truth and justice going in the face of a crippling financial blockade. But given founder Julian Assange's history of media manipulation, it's hard not to suspect more sinister motives. Given that Beat the Blockade is being launched in the same week as the Spice Girls comeback – Viva Forever! The Spice musical – is Assange's most outrageous mission yet to upstage Posh and Ginger?

The Wikileaks founder certainly has the makings of a pop star. He is blond with chiseled features and has had run-ins with the law. In fact, he's currently holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape and indecency – which is more than you can say about some gangster rappers.

Assange, however, may not even feature on the record. Unusually for Wikileaks, the album arrives with no information about who the musical "supporters" are. But whoever the likes of Wikibeetz4wikileaks may be, Beat the Blockade is an album in the spirit of the Wiki founder: hard-hitting, informative and surreal. This is probably the only release this year that will combine powerful statements ("It's been said that the first casualty of war is truth") with Pinky and Perky voices.

The 50s TV pigs' influence features on manifesto-like opener Wikileaks and the Need for Free Speech, which otherwise betrays the major influence of the Streets' Mike Skinner, who would surely be proud of such meticulously complex raps as the unusually self-doubting "Does it [Wikileaks] pillory the bigotries of ministry's tyranny or is it merely hindering the coalition's victory?"

Elsewhere, the album engages in self-mythology, telling the site's story via earnest sloganeering rock, cod reggae, Lady Gaga-ish pop (Datacrime 2011) and even (gulp) a Wikileaks Samba. But perhaps the often eyebrow-raising music is a clever smokescreen to divert authorities from the power of the content.

The mostly sincere lyrics articulate what a lot of people are feeling: it's time to police the police; governments fight too many wars; ordinary citizens know nothing of what is being done in their name.

Still, there are some wonderfully clunky rhymes, delivered in the style of a down-wit'-da'-homies bank manager ("Should we listen to the whistleblowers? Of course! Even if it'll throw us!") and infuriatingly catchy tunes, such as Where There Are No Secrets, which addresses FBI surveillance in the unlikely rebel style of Chris Rea.

The most controversial moment is surely (don't laugh) The Ballad of Julian Assange, which reworks a John Lennon title and a famous Beatles intro ("I heard the news just yesterday/ that they've taken you away …"). Unfortunately, the song's portrait of the fugitive whistleblower as a state-hounded, wrongly accused martyr for freedom is possibly hampered by it sounding like the Clash's Guns of Brixton played on toy instruments.

In fact, Beat the Blockade's true hero is Bradley Manning, the American soldier facing life in jail for exposing supposedly dangerous state secrets, whose name lends a title to no less than three songs, of which the heartfelt rap B Manning is infinitely preferable to the cod flamenco of Bradley's Song.

Perhaps what could be said for Manning may apply to the album: "Try to silence something and it will become amplified." On the other hand, Beat the Blockade's chances of selling more copies than Assange's memoir may be compromised by the nature of Wikileaks and its followers.

As one has already noted: "Why buy it when someone will leak it on the internet?" • You can download Wikileaks Supporters: Beat the Blockade from cdbaby.com.