★★★★½
Fat White Family’s new album is the Mother’s Day gift from hell; less a nice set of soaps and a bottle of that perfume she’s been eyeing up and more a mauled carcass dragged back to the den by a young predator.
It’s messy, demented and utterly unsettling, and in this way, it reaches levels of bloody exuberance other bands could only dream of.
Songs For Our Mothers sees the band ironically toying with the aesthetics of fascism: the music video for the darkly brilliant gem ‘Whitest Boy On The Beach’ has the mob shaved and pale, looking like the most malnourished skinheads around, and the album contains songs with titles like ‘Goodbye Goebbels’ and ‘Lebensraum’.
But Fat White Family aren’t fascists – they’re anarchists through and through – and the lurching pleasures of a tune like the woozy ‘Satisfied’ rests upon an utter rejection of all forms of authority. ‘Love Is The Crack’ takes things one step further, twisting the rhetoric of racists inside out, and revealing the essential ridiculousness of the xenophobic chant, “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack,” picking it apart until it becomes an Edward Lear-esque oddity.
Fat White Family’sSongs For Our Mothersis available now through Without Consent.
