By: Stuart Benjamin
Fat White Family | facebook | twitter |
Released on January 22, 2016 via Without Consent
There’s a train of thought that says, if your band isn’t feral, carnal, and offensive to just about everyone then you’re wasting everybody’s time – after all, who really wants to listen to records by Coldplay? No doubt in some semi-detached, floral patterned, neutral coloured living room, sadists even now are singing along to ‘Yellow’. Emerging out of a South London squat, Fat White Family set up our sacred politically correct cows and undermine them with the most subversive of black humour – what else would you expect from a band that describe their new record as “an invitation sent by misery to dance to the beat of human hatred”?
If any band is the antithesis of everything that’s wrong with rock music in the UK, then the Fat White Family are just that. Theirs is a post-punk, psychedelic fuzz of perverted and bellicose posturing designed to offend the comfortable and attract the young. There’s a band like Fat White Family in every generation – The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols, The Butthole Surfers – so it’s not hard to be a bad-ass band. What IS hard is getting noticed in the twenty-first century, where revolution and revolt have been packaged, priced, sold as a commodity to a youth who can buy into their rebellion at the click of an iPhone App or a Facebook ‘like’.
I loved Champagne Apocalypse, a glorious excursion into a savage rock ‘n’ roll with hat tips to The Fall, sordid sexual encounters, and the carpet bombing of Disneyland. Since then we’ve also had their Moonlandingz collaboration (with the Eccentronic Research Council (aka The ERC) and Maxine Peake) – Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine … I’m Your Biggest Fan. a tale of a fictional, unhinged, and all-together far too sinister woman’s obsession with a fictional, unhinged, and all-together far too sinister band. Songs for our Mothers comes, then, with the heavy weight of expectation.
How to describe the new record? Let’s make a lazy comparison: where Champagne Apocalypse was Funhouse by The Stooges, Songs for our Mothers is The Idiot by Iggy Pop. The former is an out-and-out rocker filled with furious guitars in various states of distortion, the latter has more experimental, electronic leanings, while retaining much of the excitement that got us all to sit up and listen in the first instance.
Noticeably, a lot of the lo-fi electronic influence of The ERC has rubbed off and the production is as sparse as you like. Lias Saoudi’s vocals, a bucolic combination of mumbling and shouting cover every subject from mass murderer Harold Shipman, the relationship of Ike and Tina turner, through to the last dying days of the Nazis in the Berlin bunker, when the trapped rats began to turn on one another. Saoudi yelps through the songs like Marc Bolan on bad acid, and it’s terrific.
Meanwhile the band work through ten tunes that epitomise their drone/disco/psych punk dynamic. The whole album crackles along with dark energy, from the opener ‘Whitest Boy on the Beach’ through to the low-fi dustbin chic of ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’. Between the totalitarian obsessed ‘Lebensraum’ and ‘Goodbye Goebbels’, songs are steeped in images of twisted, tortuous, and difficult relationships, abuses of power between friends/lovers, between those in positions of power and those who are powerless (the obsessions with Shipman and Goebbels aren’t just there as a gimmick), and where those desperately flawed emotional dynamics linger long after the relationship has ended.
Go back and listen to Champagne Holocaust and then go back to this one and you’ll see how well the record works as a companion to the first album – and like the debut there’s always that sensation that the whole thing will fall apart and collapse at any given moment in time. There’s a precariousness to this music which perhaps comes from the artistic tensions that exist in the band. For me the last few songs on the record lose some of the momentum of the first half, but it’s great to see this band back in an album that contains some scenes that viewers will find disturbing and is most definitely NSFW. Welcome back.
