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. 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.
