FAT WHITE FAMILY - FORGIVENESS IS YOURS - DOMINO

The cult south-London band’s resplendent fourth album, Forgiveness Is Yours, released on Friday, April 26, has, like everything they’ve done, pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, their very existence.

To Lias Saoudi, Forgiveness Is Yours “is about life as eternal contingency…about no longer suspecting, but knowing that this shit will never get any easier…in fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse, your body’s going to go into decay and the people you love will slowly start dropping dead around you…but somehow, you’ve smashed enough of your expectations thus far in life, you’re sort of fine with it…you accept it.” Its eleven tracks come on like a sideways state of the nation tirade, a bulletin of indignities chronicling times spinning wildly out of joint yet happily, for all its creators’ sufferings (founding member Saul Adamczewski permanently and acrimoniously left the band during its recording), Forgiveness Is Yours is an embarrassment of delights.

We can only take Lias at his word when he says, ‘The overarching aesthetic themes at work here are torpor and further torpor still.’ Forgiveness Is Yours is a testament to the will to create even when catastrophes keep happening, when you’ve come out of the drug-fog long enough to realize that the damage is irreparable, all truces are fleeting, and the game was never worth the candle. Burned clear, blasted free of illusions, Forgiveness Is Yours is a quintessence of disenchantment and the bittersweet fruit of vicious, sinister times. Let’s enjoy it while we can — there’s nothing like it around.

Right from their earliest days, Fat White Family have instinctively grasped the long-neglected power of myth in rock’n’roll, the necessity of giving people something (or nothing) to believe in. In a drab monoculture of play-it-safe pop careerists, Fat White Family carry the sacred flame. A band with the power to inspire, they are vehemently punk not in sound but in spirit, and their live shows are the stuff of urban legend — fervid whispers told of raw shamanic force, unbridled ferocity, shocking acts of transgression and self-abasement.

During the tumultuous period it’s taken for the new album to arrive, the band has remained active on multiple fronts. Side projects and solo projects abound, they remade The Shawshank Redemption on their phones via Instagram, supported Liam Gallagher at his biggest solo show at Knebworth, made and screened an exquisite, Bergman-tinged short film Moonbathing in February while Lias made the surprise lockdown move of refashioning himself as one of the more entertaining, recklessly candid prose writers around, first with his column for The Social, “Beyond the Neutral Zone,” and then by collaborating with author Adelle Stripe on one of the great rock’n’roll books of this or any other decade, Ten-Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure.