Fat White Family are arguably best known for their on-stage nudity and confrontational use of Nazi imagery in their work. Their 2019 album Serfs Up!, however, found the South London provocateurs finally putting as much effort into their music as they have their public antics. On Forgiveness Is Yours, the band continues to hone their songwriting and musicianship, with genre pastiches ranging from psychedelic folk (“John Lennon”), orchestral pop (“Religion for One”), conga-driven disco (“Bullet of Dignity”), and danceable post-punk (“Polygamy Is Only for the Chief”). Think Serge Gainsbourg and Leonard Cohen meets Pulp.
Singer Lias Saoudi employs a trendy sprechgesang on tracks like “The Archivist” and “Today You Became a Man.” Impressively, he spends the latter song reading paragraphs’ worth of text, compellingly describing his older brother’s circumcision (without anesthesia) at the age of five, accompanied by skittering percussion and gurgling electronics. Saoudi addresses his Algerian heritage with a typically barbed touch, his agitation heightened by the track’s jagged tempo.
Other songs start off tunefully but turn into more free-form chaos, as on “Polygamy Is Only for the Chief,” whose polished surface thrillingly dissolves into frayed noise. “Religion for One” rolls along more slowly, dripping bile through its pretty melody and mist of choral vocals: “Spit out that cum/My patience’s dissipating.” (A shrewd YouTuber summed up the vicious track as “Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ as performed by Patrick Bateman.”)
Fat White Family may have dropped some of the more antagonistic aspects of their image and adopted a slightly slicker sound, but their anger is still very palpable. Music isn’t worth performing, they seem to suggest, if it doesn’t risk pissing people off, or at least challenging the listener’s complacency. With Forgiveness Is Yours, Saoudi and company achieve that objective—with a patina of sophistication.
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