Speaking to what’s left of the weekly music press, Fat White Family guitarist Saul Adamczewski offered his sales pitch for the band’s second album. “We’ve really tried to go to the extremes of what’s tasteful,” he offered, “or even good.” This is the kind of hyperbolic remark fame-hungry bands are wont to make in the middle of NME features that breathlessly detail their druggy excesses and establishment-baiting credentials: a jaded observer might suggest that the most surprising thing about it is that the NME still interviews bands, presumably as a sideline to its main business of running advertorial for computer companies and encouraging its readers to buy toiletries. But Adamczewski wasn’t exaggerating. Over the course of its 11 tracks, Songs for Our Mothers variously takes in fascism – there’s a track sung in German called Lebensraum, while the seven minutes of Duce achieves the not inconsiderable feat of being an even more incomprehensible song about Mussolini than the Scott Walker one that featured the erstwhile crooner punching a piece of meat – serial killers, domestic abuse and racist chanting, before concluding with Goodbye Goebbels, a lachrymose country ballad sung from the viewpoint of Hitler, reminiscing “about the good times” with his minister of propaganda shortly before their suicides.
This is all presumably intended either as a riposte to the way rock music’s capacity for furore-inducing transgression has become increasingly blunted – it’s perhaps telling that Adamczewski once plied his trade in the Metros, a wan, post-Libertines pop-punk band who dealt in precisely the kind of carefully scripted rebellious posturing that Songs for Our Mothers seems to mock – or as satire on the current climate of censoriousness, in which certain sections of the internet seem to be engaged in an endless search for things to be offended by. In a world in which someone appears to find almost everything, no matter how innocuous, “problematic”, here’s something so wilfully, relentlessly, self-evidently problematic as to boggle even the most libertarian mind. You don’t have to be the kind of person who spends their days forensically examining the lyrics of pop records in order to find something problematic to be horrified by the disgusting line in Satisified, where frontman Lias Saoudi compares a woman fellating him to a starving Auschwitz inmate reduced to “sucking the marrow out of a bone”.
Whether it’s one or the other, or indeed both, it’s worth noting that we’ve been here before: Songs for Our Mothers fairly obviously exists in the shadow of Throbbing Gristle, and not merely because they pushed almost every disquieting button pushed here 40 years ago. You can hear echoes of their debut album, Second Annual Report, in the muffled production, and in the way the vocals are frequently distorted with electronic effect and buried within the mix, so the listener has to strain to hear them – as if trying to eavesdrop on something deeply unpleasant. It’s an influence Fat White Family openly acknowledge, just as they’ve previously noted their debt to the Fall and the Country Teasers – the promotional photographs for their single The Whitest Boy on the Beach were an obvious homage to the cover of TG’s 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats – and there’s little doubt the old provocations still pack a punch. Even the critic from the Quietus, a website that staunchly supports Fat White Family, drew the line at Hits Hits Hits’ queasy puns about the violence meted out to Tina Turner by her then-husband Ike.
Still, a jaded voice might contend, the big difference is that Throbbing Gristle’s taboo-busting was set to music so strange and groundbreaking that it spawned an entire genre. Songs for Our Mothers sticks closer to a lo-fi rock template – distorted guitars, primitive drum machines invariably set to a crawling tempo, bursts of electronic noise – with mixed results. Sometimes the juxtaposition of music and subject matter works. There’s an infectious, romantic sentimentality about the tune of Goodbye Goebbels that makes the song all the more unsettling, while Satisified sets its grimness to a weirdly effective cocktail of grinding synthesised bass, Casio keyboard drums and twanging guitar line, midway between the riff of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus and John Barry’s perky theme tune to Juke Box Jury. Blessed with some of the album’s most innocuous lyrics, The Whitest Boy on the Beach is just fantastic, a sickly sounding take on Giorgio Moroder’s brand of disco.
Elsewhere, it feels a bit wanting. Fat White Family have always struggled to capture the power of their live performances in the studio, and there’s a chance that the lumbering din of We Must Learn to Rise and Duce gain potency on stage, but here they sound interminable and tediously flat: an endless racket featuring someone banging on vaguely about a fascist dictator, which is something anyone with even a passing knowledge of extreme music is going to have heard dozens of times before. Worse, there’s something a bit smirky about When Shipman Decides’ waltz beat, oompah brass and pub piano: it sounds like something you might hear in an “edgy” student comedy revue, which is surely not what they were aiming for.
The question of what Fat White Family are aiming for is unanswered over Songs for Our Mothers, the confusion compounded further by Tinfoil Deathstar, which, amid all the willful amorality and nihilism, seems to take an oddly moralistic stance about sequestering yourself from the horror of the outside world with drugs. Whatever the album is trying to do – provoke, confront, horrify – it only partially achieves it. Some of it is genuinely shocking, some of it reminds you of that old Onion news story about Marilyn Manson going door-to-door trying to shock people. Some of it is viscerally thrilling, some of it just bores you stiff. Fat White Family clearly think rock music needs a bomb putting under it, and they’ve got a point. Yet Songs for Our Mothers feels like a bomb that only partially detonates.
