Album: Fat White Family – Songs For Our Mothers

Released 22nd January 2016 via Fat Possum Records

9/10

Songs For Our Mothers. Now here is an album to get excited about, and in no small amount unsettled by. This is, as followers of the Fat White Family will know, quite par for the course for this particular band of self professed “cripples and social retards”. The title alone with any prior knowledge of the Fat Whites is enough to make you squirm, and it doesn’t disappoint. It drones, wails, and croons through 10 debauched tracks that will make your skin crawl. Lias Saoudi, the waifish, grey-skinned frontman, sings about Hitler and Goebbels, Ike and Tina Turner, his own destructive relationship with guitarist Saul Adamczewski, and paints pictures of some of the most sordid recesses of human desire and depravity.

It is probably important to add at this point that Songs For Our Mothers, the follow up to their bitterly brilliant 2013 debut Champagne Holocaust, is an exceptional album and a clear sign of progression. The last two years by all accounts have been a tumultuous time for the group and there are plenty of gaps in the narrative that led them from the Queens Head pub in south London (where they recorded their first album) through numerous line-up changes, to Sean Lennon’s New York apartment, all via their customary brinkmanship with self-destruction.

It’s likely then that this album was borne out of a great deal of anger and misery, as well as rare artistic ability. Singles ‘Touch the Leather’ and ‘I Am Mark E Smith’ have teased the near boundless potential the Fat Whites possess over the last two years, and this potential is realised over the course of this album.

The strangled vitriol that embodied Champagne Holocaust isn’t left behind, though it is refined into a more measured menace. The sinister chanting on ‘Duce’ is quite unintelligible for the most part, but judging by the crashing drums, the rumbling bass and the demonic harmonies, you can bet it’s probably something nasty. Adamczewski’s creaking guitar and nightmarish arrangement make ‘Duce’ a mammoth track that will make you feel as though you’ve just been subject to some ancient ritual, probably involving a haunted mausoleum, the blood of a few virgins and a full moon.

This kind of overwhelming onslaught of sound is combined with the somewhat perverted Hawaiian feel of songs such as ‘Lebensraum’ or ‘When Shipman Decides’, which put a fairly sedate spin on characters more commonly associated with war crimes and/or murder. Listening to ‘Lebensraum’ was almost certainly the first time I’ve ever been led to imagine Adolf Hitler stretching out in a deck chair, adorned in some lurid floral patterns, maybe cracking open a cold Becks, and really starting to enjoy the living space he has murdered thousands to create. It is moments like this that demonstrate what the Fat White Family are all about, fed up with the music of their peers, delving into the most pathetic corners of mankind’s psyche, revelling in the worst of all of us.

They draw uncomfortable parallels and construct disturbing images that, although extreme, represent the fact that really they don’t think music is all that good these days, not to mention the political landscape. Their own situation of couch surfing and dealing with dangerous addictions and destructive relationships is hardly rosy either.

But they embrace their own gruesomeness and claw back some pride the only way they can: By making some noise and being brutal in their assessment of Britain, London, music, politics, and human nature. They have always been unreserved in interviews, never holding anything back, whether it’s to criticise George Osbourne or Mac De Marco, and they are equally as unabashed in their songs. The honesty and vivid vitality of their art is something to be applauded in a music scene peppered with success hungry posers and vapid opportunists.

If the current musical landscape in Britain was a party, and the Arctic Monkeys were the leather jacketed, sickeningly confident guest who was chatting up all the best looking girls and drinking everyone else’s booze, then the Fat White Family would be the unapproachable, drooling, semi-naked bloke hunched in a corner on his own muttering to himself balefully in tongues.

Sure, maybe many of us think we’d like to be the suave go-getter Alex Turner reckons he is, but we’re all droolers deep down. Everyone’s got a dark place in their brain somewhere, no one is as cool as they think they are and anyone who is certain that they are can still purchase AM from all the usual places, and probably spends ages on their hair.

Everyone else should go buy this album. The pay off is immense, not least the masterful closer ‘Goodbye Goebbels’ which, after the relentless onslaught and immersive qualities of the first 9 songs, gives the impression that you are emerging from the dust and rubble of the Fuhrer Bunker into a desolate, silent Berlin, resigned to defeat and resigned to the fact that humans are far from perfect, finding solace in the fact that this album nearly is.

Highlights: ‘Satisfied’, ‘Hits Hits Hits’, ‘Goodbye Goebbels’