Fat White Family - Forgiveness Is Yours Review
This album is as free-wheeling, experimental and ambitious as it is combative, cynical and challenging of a creative industry indefinitely homogenised by gentrification and the late-stage capitalist West.
Is there a current band more controversial than Fat White Family? Formed in 2011 in a squat in Peckham, the band have on-stage excretion, public fights with IDLES front-man Joe Talbot, and subversive drug-fuelled Glastonbury sets attached like neon lights to their name. Yet, they’re also known for evocative and moving poetry sets, a serious interest in art and activism, and the excruciatingly honest, self-flagellating Sunday Times best-seller ‘Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure’, co-written by front-man Lias Saoudi and Adelle Stripe. We’ve all heard it before: they’re a ‘drug band with a rock problem’. Reflecting on a Brixton Academy headline played with a head full of speed, MDMA, acid, mushrooms, heroin and liquor, Lias admits that in attempting to make success of myself, I had all but ruined my life. What sort of band, then, have they resuscitated here, four years since their last release?
The shallow end, first: the album’s pre-released singles were awash with ululating art-deco influence and that undeniable Lias drawl; ‘Religion for One’ graced the scene in 2023, depicting the selfish, paranoid, hallucinatory space the drug-abuser often occupies. This ominous hypnosis is carried throughout the album, finding animation in disco beats, woozy jazz, and somnolent poetry.
‘Today You Become Man’ is hard to listen to twice, but is pressing and necessary, feverishly documenting Lias’ older brother's circumcision. The tumultuous, fragmented childhood of the Saoudi brothers, two of whom remain constants in the band (that is, until now), split between a racist Northern Ireland during the Troubles and conventional Algeria emboss Lias’ lyrics with a Burroughs-esque technicolour.
There’s something to entertain at every turn: ‘Feed The Horses’ uses cowboy guitars and shrugging drums to detail a nightmarish Britain characterised by lack; ‘What’s That You Say’ bounces playfully between cheeky synth melodies, Disney-esque added vocables, a sultry whispered soundscape and a solid bass line; ‘Work’ is an album highlight, transforming moaning bass and elegant strings from a driving, dizzying verse to a hyper-manic chorus.
It's a drug record, yes, one of the best in recent music history, spewing more insight the more you prod at it. But it’s also a driven and distinctively nuanced criticism of the structures that shape our thoughts, keep us squarely in place, policed by the privileged elite who fail to separate evisceration from endorsement. The band set aflame this shape-shifting, one-size-fits-all socio-political mentality propagated through illusory collective action and industrial qualities of shame, to paraphrase Lias. ‘Bullet of Dignity’ showcases this directly alongside triumphant disco-grunge: Eco-political dread on a bedroom sized bed.
What’s more, the album also attacks the self-indulgent art-world eating its own tail for breakfast. ‘The Archivist’ is tongue-in-cheek as an opener: Lias himself notes that his song w ‘really tries to hit the beating heart of cliché’. ‘You Can’t Force it’ barrels across time in its beauty – the album spreads across decades of artistry as in the tale of fantastic song ‘John Lennon’ – and the album, as is put here, ‘dies with a smirk on its face’. How FWF can pack this in amongst jibs at guitarist and recalcitrant rebel Saul Adamczewski after their polemical final split is pretty impressive. ‘Saul was always trying to destroy the band since there was a band,’ Lias told The Quietus; the band publicly fall in and out of love for each other incessantly, fuelled by narcotic mania.
Where does this leave us? With an up-coming UK tour, and only one man promoting the album, it’s hard to say whether the riotous promise of their live sets will ever come to fruition, or whether blood feuds and decaying friendships havocked by addiction is the end of the road for this delightful cult band, this time for good. No matter, this album is as free-wheeling, experimental and ambitious as it is combative, cynical and challenging of a creative industry indefinitely homogenised by gentrification and the late-stage capitalist West. I might end here by predicting what 2024 has in store for Fat White Family, but if there’s one thing to take from this article, it’s that that is a highly impossible task. You don’t predict, you just accept, sweat collecting gloriously at your throat.