Forgiveness Is Yours [Clear Vinyl]

Fat White Family are back. The cult south-London band’s long-gestated fourth album, Forgiveness Is Yours, has, like everything they’ve done but more so, pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, and their very existence. The external enemies have melted away — perhaps they were hallucinations all along. The Fat Whites’ dirty war was only ever with themselves — a war for hearts and minds, their own as much as anyone’s. A war whose primary objective, it turns out, was survival.

To singer Lias Saoudi, the Fat Whites’ resplendent new record, Forgiveness Is Yours, ‘is about what happens when you run out of road’ — the music you make when you’re at the end of the line, your tether, the world. Its twelve tracks come on like a sideways state of the nation tirade, a bulletin of indignities chronicling times spinning wildly out of joint.

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, 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.

We can only take Lias Saoudi at his word when he says, ‘The overarching aesthetic themes at work here are honesty and survival.’ 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. The revolution has turned on itself; the movement is devouring its offspring; the drugs definitively did not work. Everything is broken, everything is brilliant. 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.

Tracklisting

The Archivist
John Lennon
Bullet of Dignity
Polygamy Is Only For The Chief
Visions of Pain
Today You Become Man
Religion for One
Feed The Horse
What's That You Say
Work
You Can't Force It