Fat White Family
Forgiveness Is Yours
★★★★
Domino WIGLP 467 (CD, LP)
Fat White Family are a band who’ve consistently snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over the years. Founded in Peckham, London in
2011, the self-destructive tendencies they’ve become notorious for seem oddly anachronistic a little more than a decade later. The six-piece gives the impression of being the last great rock’n’roll survivors, living up to very 20th century expectations in the service of Dionysus. The landscape has changed and everything feels safer these days, and more to the point, nobody really forms bands anymore (and if they do, record companies are unlikely to touch them).
The Fat Whites are a reminder of how we once were, which can be uncomfortable for some. It’s perhaps a factor in why they’re not yet as huge as they could be. More importantly, while they’ve made some excellent, forward-thinking music, it’s never quite lived up to the energy or the danger of the live performances. 2019’s Serfs Up! was a step in the right direction, though with the departure of main musical ideas man Saul Adamczewski, and members channelling their efforts into other ventures, the signs didn’t necessarily look good for the long term.
As contradictory as ever, then, Fat White
Family have shaken off an integral member to become the band they’ve always promised to be, pooling their resources to make everything more multidimensional and unpredictable. Forgiveness Is Yours is without question the band’s best album to date, full of surprising diversions and even more surprising musical ideas that sometimes border on the sophisticated. Even though there’s little uniformity, it hangs together nicely and is always intriguing, like a series of vignettes or short stories.
Bullet Of Dignity sounds like the Happy Mondays, had they discovered Dabke, while John Lennon eschews any notion of pastiche, employing doughy electronica and Kruder & Dorfmeister-style flutes carried along by a quickening pulse and the narrative delivered in intimate sing-speak. The latter song recounts singer Lias Saoudi’s tale of encountering Yoko Ono whilst on ketamine and being told by the legendary artist that he has the look of her late husband. Musically, it’s as weirdly dreamlike as you’d hope, very nearly tipping into new-age-y at times, but when set against Saoudi’s sardonic lyric, it instead seems to take us somewhere we’ve never really been before.
There are two spoken word tracks, too; the opener The Archivist, which comes on like a Fast Show buried gem, and the remarkable Today
You Become A Man, which takes on unusual subject matter, namely Saoudi’s older brother’s circumcision in Algeria. It’s a terrifying, hysterical four minutes, as hilariously dark as The Velvet Underground’s The Box and as avant-funky as
Miles Davis’ On The Corner. As you may have guessed by now, the title of the album is grimly mocking, taking a swipe at the endless need in modern discourse for everything to have some kind of redemptive arc. Nevertheless, Forgiveness Is Yours, and victory is theirs… should they want it.