Track Reviews // Fat White Family - When I Leave
19th April 2019
3rd single from album ‘Serf’s Up! (Domino, 19th
April 2019)
Although the droning bass
throb of their early work survives on their latest record ‘Serf’s
Up’, Fat White Family’s new bag is the soaring, melodic guitars and the curtain
of heaving instrumentation they strike out from. And this is nowhere better
evinced than on third single ‘When I Leave’.
The band that previously
shouted ‘Shipman!’ and ‘Goebbels!’ turn capably to kind of baroque, sighing
Americana that soundtracked a generation’s impression of manifest destiny. Giants
like Ennio Morricone and The Shadows mined that stolen mystic America which
still runs through channels of inspiration under the dustbowls and asphalt suburbs. Last
month’s Pony by Orville Peck and the untouchable work of Angel Olson among
others tap into the brash, melancholic vein that Fat White Family have
discovered.
Like the first single ‘Feet’,
a blistering return from a band who recently faltered, ‘When I Leave’ has a
relentless swell that never fully breaks or dissipates. The whole album is a
series of vignettes that churn like rising coils; the strings spurring on this
latest single’s groove would make Visconti go weak and the rising tension
throughout the song’s 5 and a half minute is irresistible.
But, fear not ye who lament
that this is not the band that once skated their members’ arses through their
music videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0e5ShFK5aM), the lush musical
setting belies a gloriously seedy sexuality in the lyrics from Lias Saudi. It’s
in parallel with the peristaltic rhythm and bass and threatens like the storms
in the backgrounds of the American Sublime. The tense mingling of musical
cultures colours a grim South London shadow on the pastoral American expanse.
Somewhere between Bleak House and As I Lay Dying.
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