Fat White Family
Songs for Our Mothers

I was in Groningen, a somewhat remote city amidst rivers of fried fish and houseboats in the north of the Netherlands. Among other things, there are also quite a few record stores, so we enter what seems to be the best-stocked one—and the partner studying there confirms it. My God, it must be like a lifetime since I last bought a record, mainly because I don't really have the drive to find physical copies of things I'm genuinely interested in: thus, I surprise myself and the unexpected urge, just upon crossing the threshold of this PLATO Music, to take home a copy of Songs For Our Mothers by Fat White Family. A singular title, somewhat like if Giò di Tonno titled a biographical concept album about Charles Manson. If like me you had listened to it several times by then, you would have known it's the second record by this band of drug-addicts born in some vaguely defined London squat by two Northern Irish brothers with Middle Eastern relatives, in a degenerate team-up with an obvious heroin addict. I haven't yet figured out whether it's the bassist or the guitarist. I think it's the guitarist. For the record, he's the most gaunt guy in the big single video.

After the big single, which is the first track—decently danceable and filled with genius sparks between cathartic trumpets, sexually deviant anthems, and demonic Charlie—the others gradually slip into the vaguely languid, disfigured hell of these guys, new heirs of psychedelia: formally, and even more so in spiritual terms, I'm ready to consider them the true last sons of Spacemen 3, and you can hit me for that. "Who's the weakest ring in the chain now?" The album has been described by themselves as "an invitation, sent by misery, to dance to the beat of human hatred." The jokers here lived for quite some time in the degeneracy above a pub, and it's not the only analogy one can make with the Birthday Party. The smegmatic chaos of suggestions they refer to pours moods and bodily fluids, resonates with elongated animal pieces of meat slapped skin on skin, nudity, and various forms of subliminal violence. In this second album, better produced than the (still very cool) garage of the debut, there's everything: from Goebbels to (obvious) love drugs to Tina Turner to the desecration of Primo Levi. Some jerk might claim to perceive a cohesive imagery or might go as far as to try to determine and delineate the intellectual project (?????) of Lias and the gang behind their decadent (defecating) and provocative mystical-diabolic fanfares, but whatever, for me, the music and a dip into the acid are enough. There's no need for Fat White Family to awaken the freaks of history or those within you; indeed, a day of work or university is more than sufficient for that: music is made for the suspension of judgment and the allure of the abyss, and the best part is that perhaps they themselves could not decide whether to admit they make it an art or merely an opportunity to whip it out live. It's said that Lias often does it; he even did it at the last Ypsigrock in Castelbuono, Sicily, getting himself reported. But that's not why I want to see them; it's because if I missed them once more, I'd again feel like I've lost something like the only living rock band.

I never thought I'd use the word rock like this again and leave it written despite feeling immense disgust, but in the end, when I buy a band's record, it feels like I'm giving a bit of money to all those I never bought it from. The whitest on the beach. This review sucks, but in the end, it has to be this way.