“Art is a stuffed crocodile,” wrote the French proto-dadaist Alfred Jarry. If I were a stuffed crocodile, I’d be insulted, but Jarry had a point. You have to look hard to find live crocodiles in the indie rock world, where stuffed crocodiles like Tame Impala and their tepid ilk hold sway, but I think I’ve found a real live one that could actually bite your leg off in South London’s Fat White Family. They may be a lot of things, including debauched and depraved, but they have the uncommon decency to be amusing about it.
Fat White Family (who got their start in a squat in Peckham) have been offending the intestinal sensibilities of listeners since 2013, when they released their debut LP Champagne Holocaust—a play on Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova.” An NME writer described the (then) six-piece’s music as “constantly on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own politics, poverty, and vicious intent,” and how wonderful is that “vicious intent”?
Fat White Family also established a reputation for their self-destructive habits. Said vocalist (and band Withnail) Lias Saoudi to an interviewer for The Guardian, who commented on how… unwell they looked, “Rock ‘n’ rollers are supposed to be close to death, aren’t they? It’s your job to be out there on the edge, pummeling your body with weird shit.”
Speaking of weird shit, the no-fi music on Champagne Holocaust brings to mind the Mekons, The Fugs, The Fall, even the Manson Family. But they’re not strictly primitives, as the organ and funk guitar that propel opener “Auto Neutron” make clear. The song is slick, by Fat White Family standards, and almost sedate, and the group vocals (“We are auto neutron,” they sing, like they’re Devo or somebody) are, if anything, soothing. Guitarist Saul Adamczewski’s stinging solo, which devolves into pure fuzz, isn’t soothing, and that “gonna burn your shed down” at the end is a bit disquieting, but for the most part, what we have here is a song that won’t make anyone scream “Turn this shit off!”
No, the primitivism isn’t apparent until they hit you with the very shambolic campfire sing-along (complete with poorly played guitar) “Who Shot Lee Oswald?” Fat White Family’s list of possible assassins includes the usual suspects (the FBI and CIA) before taking a sharp left turn into the intriguing—the BBC, Andy Warhol, and even the Velvet Underground. Or “Was it I shimmering in a malignant mind?” they ask. They also ask, “Who shot that good man down?” (which cracks me up) before offering up another candidate in the personage of Bobby Monroe, who I’m assuming is the same Bobby Monroe who coined the phrase “out-of-body experience.” But I could be wrong.
One person they don’t mention—but should, he’s my prime suspect—is JFK himself. He had means and motive, even if I’ve yet to figure the opportunity part out.
But by that time, they’ve already hit you with the really quite melodic track “Is It Raining in Your Mouth?” The song ends with Saoudi screaming, “Shoot it in the middle of my motherfucking face/Shoot it in my face/C’mon baby I’m gonna explode,” which tells you what kind of rain we’re talking about, but the important thing to know about the song is it’s catchy as hell, what with its fetching melody, driving guitar riff and opening chimes. Why, the song might have had hit potential were it not for the suspect lines “I was born to have it/And you were born to take it/So tell me baby is it raining in your mouth?” And the way Saoudi repeats the line “Five sweaty fingers on my dashboard” over and over before basically going berserk, screaming the “motherfucking face” stuff. It’s a real humdinger, this one, my album fave.
“Without Consent” features a driving melody, hard-to-make-out but queasy-making lyrics that I suspect have something to do with incest, and a guitar freak-out at the end. “Special Ape” could be a Frank Zappa song—the vocals will make you laugh, it totters along like a deranged blues, and everything dissolves into a guitar squall.
“Cream of the Young” is slow and features some echoing female vocals behind Saoudi, who sings, “I’m pleading for you baby, your fifteen-year-old tongue,” seemingly as a treatment for his host of medical issues (“You’re my ibuprofen, you’re my ECT/I’ve got ulcers baby, won’t you come and make them leave”). You also get lots of squealing fuzz guitar. And everybody goes madcap towards the end, which is always nice.
I have no idea what the methodically driving “Wild American Prairie” is about and I’m not sure Fat White Family does either, and it doesn’t help that it’s almost impossible to make out the lyrics and even the websites that are supposed to tell you what the lyrics are can’t make them out either, but I like the deadpan vocals and the lyrics I can make out (“I’m yanking my cock”) make me WISH I could understand what Saoudi is singing. All I can tell you for sure is that things get wilder and wilder, everybody sings the title over and over again, and things end in swirling anarchy.
“Borderline” is another Boy Scouts-gone-feral kuntry-blooze sing-along, accompanied by a rapidly strummed guitar. “If my mind was clean” sing the Fat White Family over and over again, along with such amusing lines as “There’s an empty space inside your head, fill it up with lead, fill it up with lead” and “Bury me next to Gandhi, it’s all been a waste of time, it’s all been a waste of time.”
It’s followed by the frantic banger “Heaven on Earth,” which sounds like anything but. Saoudi sings like he’s being attacked by bees, Adamczewski’s guitar has teeth and knows how to use them, and the whole thing flies past you like a clown car filled with homicidal maniacs. If you listen carefully, you can hear the attacked-by-bees Saoudi scream things like “Do you know where you belong?/You belong in prison” and “Were you born or were you made?” and “I only speak two days of the week/Who is the empire’s most competent slave?” But mostly he just screams “Yeah yeah yeah/Heaven on Earth.” A real winner.
As is the pummel horse bang-shang-a-lang “Bomb Disneyland,” which has a kind of speedy Bo Diddley beat and opens with the family-friendly lyrics “Give the kids enough rope/And let them hang themselves.” The pre-chorus goes “All your kids are dead kids/All your kids are dead kids/In your mind,” which is rather Mansonesque if you ask me, and the chorus doesn’t just advocate the bombing of Disneyland—dirty bombing Legoland is also on the agenda. Follow that with a guitar solo that sounds like it’s having an anxiety attack and lots of grunting, screaming, and maniacal laughter, add another guitar that sounds like it’s drowning in six inches of water, and what you have is a song that is as amusing as it is anti-social. And it too ends in wonderful chaos, with Saoudi (or somebody) attempting to make noises no human voice has ever produced before.
Closer “Garden of the Numb” is a slow acoustic guitar number and one of the greatest insult songs I’ve ever heard. I don’t know who the target of this song is, but Fat White Family follow opening lines “I’d kill you was I given half a chance/Yes, I’d like to watch you burning while you dance/You make every atom in me want to cry” with the simply wonderful “You sycophantic weasel-minded whores/You would sell your mother’s cunt to open doors,” and the quiet chorus is worth quoting in full:
“But I’m fulfilled
Because eventually time will kill
The very space you occupy
Right there at the top of the hill
In this cold inbred excuse for a world.”
Toss in a staccato guitar solo that peters out in defeat, and the guys repeating “I’m lost in the garden of the numb,” and what you have is another primitivist victory for a band that once said its goal was to make music that “makes your skin crawl.”
I don’t know why the Fat White Family makes me think of The Mekons’ phrase “Empire of the Senseless,” but what I do know is that what we have here is a dysfunctional family making dysfunctional music for dysfunctional people, and as a dysfunctional person who takes pride in being a dysfunctional person Champagne Holocaust gets my personal Seal of Approval.
There’s half-assing it and then there’s half-assing it with intent, and Fat White Family have intent galore—they’re out to give the middle finger to the polished, the self-assured, the well-adjusted, the sane, the careerists, the frantic-to-get-aheads, and just about every other tame impala who draws breath in this inbred excuse of a world.
They’re on the fringe, out on a limb, singing their hymns of perversion and deviancy, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, stuffed about them. There’s a crocodile on the loose.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
