Fats White Household album

Fats White Household

‘Forgiveness Is Yours’

(Domino)

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All nice artwork jaywalks the tightrope between genius and insanity, all nice efficiency takes this one step additional ahead and all nice poets go to the past on our behalf and Fats White Household snapshot this pearls from chaos precept higher than anybody.

The band’s fourth album, ’Forgiveness If Yours’ is filled with magnificence and insanity because it veers from leering disco to music corridor ballad to shimmering freak scenes. There’s 3D movie soundtrack and specral soundscapes, there may be gonzoid exercises and bump n grind soiled disco grooves. 

I’ve seen some nice chaotic gigs from Fats White Household over time – zig-zag wandering affairs that had been like blissful Mondays at their stoned immaculate peak – a wonderful racket that threatened to break down however by no means did and one way or the other held onto the cosmic groove. 

The band got here out of the South London undergound and spearheaded an area for an entire host of different comply with travellers – a few of which they’ve punctured within the press over time with their knack for vitriolic honesty.

I’ve additionally seen the band’s totemic singer, Lias Saoudi, ship a poetry set that landed someplace between Iggy Pop and Shakespeare. His love of phrases and wild creativeness cascading from his mouth as his physique twisted like prime-time Ig within the hazard zone. But there may be an artwork to their artwork of darkness, and the post-chemical singer has been extremely productive after cleansing up[ in the lockdown. Post plague, he became an acclaimed author and essayist, co-penning the bestselling memoir Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure with writer Adelle Stripe.

The band themselves have continued on their volatile run, if their early records were full of leering danger and brilliant, kooky off kilter imagery (who could forget Touch The Leather for all its glorious wonk) they have turned down the volume but lost none of the glorious unpredictability. Without losing the glorious madness in their area in 2024, they have somehow presented us with another take on this glorious pop/noise.

‘Forgiveness Is Yours’ is an aural adventure that shows the many sides to their perfectly cut diamond. There is the spoken word poetic opening cut, ‘The Archivist’, that sounds like sixtiesKids TV wyrd like Pogles Wood or Noggin the Nog twisted into something weird, then there is the bitches brew woozy jazz of ‘John Lennon’ with its Bowie-esque shapeshifting vocal that sings of the further adventures of John and Yoko.

This is an album that doesn’t settle into any groove. There’s burbling electronic psychedelia, electronic filth and all-nighters of sonic skree. There’s also the space disco of ‘Bullet Of Dignity’ – a perfect pop for the dark energy generation as it rides in on a throbbing bass groove and drooling sax. Its near cousin, ‘Polygamy Is Only For The Chief, ’ is further space disco weird with its unsettling neo Prince styling that swops the purple one’s sex beat and god thing for something else in its sparse shivers. ‘Religion Of One’ is a ballad of a thin man as it floats heavenwards, whilst  ‘Today You Become A Man’ is storytelling at its starkest in a dark track about circumcision plucked from the singer’s dislocated youth that saw him live in Northern Ireland, London with visits to his roots in Algeria with its attendant cultural differences. ‘Visions Of Pain’ is the kind of wonk groove that Shaun Ryder inhabits in his best moments but in the Fat’s hands is a breathy piece that also shimmers like the Funboy Three at their first album peak as the lunatics truly take over the asylum, whilst ‘Work’ is an urgent hypnotic pulse.

If this is the band’s final album, as they have hinted, then it’s an intriguing exit that leaves as many what-ifs and questions as a final totemic statement. In reality, it feels more like another snapshot from the art frontline, and there will possibly be more in the future.

Thriving on being volatile, Fat White Family have created a sophisticated soundscape without backing off from their own enticing darkness and poetic bleak visions of the now like a William Blake of the 21st century – a William Bleak of the disintegrating now. 

There is a genius at work here, a bubbling surfeit of imagination as it confronts the inner darkness and the late-night craving of the city as every hungry animal.