Fat White Family – Songs For Our Mothers

Impresses for all the right reasons...

Two years ago, Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi said: “If we’re the scariest band out there at the moment, it’s a truly tame time”. On the eve of the release of their second album ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ the statement still resounds uncomfortably true. Fat White Family are the only visible representatives of the other end of the spectrum – the polar opposite to B-town horseradish and the Radio 1 friendly riffing of Wolf Alice, Royal Blood and Slaves. Rock and roll as we know it has almost hit an impasse.

Key to taking it forward, however, are Fat White Family. They know not to take themselves too seriously and they also carry a healthy cynicism towards the Great British Pop mill. Their 2013 debut ‘Champagne Holocaust’ is a very high watermark for British rock and roll. It remains the perfect soundtrack to idling around drinking Super Tenant and smoking filterless Pall Mall roll-ups. It’s also the sort of album you can’t easily follow up. A certain level of reinvention is needed to avoid repetition and stay relevant. With follow-up ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ there’s a sense that they almost got it very right.

The good news is that their sonic palette has diversified just enough to produce some solid songs to look forward to. The hilariously titled ‘Whitest Boy On The Beach’ sees them aping the driving synth bass and Giorgio Moroder production of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. While the power in Donna’s song is the sex, the Fat Whites have succeeded in creating something so resolutely unsexy. “Who’s the whitest boy on the beach? / who’s the weakest link in the chain?” they coo tauntingly as they force you to vicariously experience their failed stint at busking in Barcelona two years ago – they cowered under some shade envious of the heat-resistant Spanish boys around them.

Jean Genet once said “to achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance”. If that’s true then Fat Whites’ finest moments here leave Kate Winslet looking like Keith Lemon. Fat White Family excel at making you get down to things that normally make you profoundly uncomfortable. The brilliant centrepiece of the album is a song called ‘Hits Hits Hits’ – a funky song about the violently abusive cocaine-fueled relationship of Ike and Tina Turner during their hit making days. It’s got the strongest groove they’ve done so far leaving you helplessly bobbing along to its brutal triple entendre.

A similarly affecting moment (again for all the wrong reasons) arrives with album closer ‘Goodbye Goebbels’. Set over loose Country Teasers style chords, it’s an artistic reimagining of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s deaths as the Third Reich crumbles around them. The band go further than they’ve ever gone with their creative license, framing it as a ‘beautiful’ moment for the pair. They did, after all, believe so strongly in what they built: “I think we’re alone now, goodbye Goebbels / Sometimes there’s no solving problems and pain / So one more refrain before our names are buried in shame”. As a song it’s executed flawlessly – the mix of blacker-than-black comedy with romance makes it weirdly heartfelt.

For all the ballsiness and twisted subject matters, ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ does limp along with some downtempo drone numbers that would be better if their lyrics were decipherable. The excitingly titled ‘When Shipman Decides’ is a twisted lullaby in waltz time about the doctor-cum-serial-killer Harold Shipman. Unfortunately the lyrics are largely unclear – the same could be said about ‘Lebensraum’ and ‘Tinfoil Deathstar'. With ‘Champagne Holocaust’, if the lyrics were unclear you could jump on the tumbledown Fall-inspired riffing. On ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ the songs are slower and more abrasive so lyrical clarity should be top of their agenda.

That said, ‘Songs For Our Mothers’ impresses for all the right reasons. Fans will welcome some of the new songs as the band’s very best. Fat White Family prove that despite the co-opting of rock and roll into the establishment there’s still bite in the old dog yet.

7/10

Words: Tim Hakki

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