Fat White Family - Songs for Our Mothers 2016

On their first album, Fat White Family sounded like they could be a group of bitter, homeless alcoholics who took to making music on battered gear found in a house where they were squatting. Three years later, the group made something of a creative shift; on 2016's Songs for Our Mothers, those winos have purchased a cheap but reliable rhythm machine and started dabbling in club music. Granted, "Whitest Boy on the Beach" and "Hits Hits Hits" are the only tunes where they make full use of their new toy, but the queasy face-off between the proto-disco groove on "Whitest Boy" and the sickly wheeze of the group's vocals (mixed low enough to make most of the lyrics unintelligible) is made to order for a band that enjoys making people uncomfortable. And while "Hits Hits Hits" is too slow for the dancefloor, the song's references to domestic violence (including invoking the names of Ike and Tina) should leave most listeners utterly appalled. Fat White Family's fearless embrace of bad taste and misanthropy was one of the hallmarks of their debut, Champagne Holocaust, and on Songs for Our Mothers they seem grimly determined to up the ante. Ultimately they hit their target, thanks to numbers like "Love Is the Crack," "Duce," and the closing "Goodbye Goebbels" (the latter imagining the final conversation between Hitlerand his most loyal associate), but there seems to be less gusto in Fat White Family's second round; the results leave no doubt that these guys have little to no use for the human race, but they toss about their bile with a more lethargic spirit, as if they've fallen deep enough into their bender to succumb to their own cynicism. One track truly stands out -- "Tinfoil Deathstar," a tale of drug abuse that has enough life in it to suggest Fat White Family might actually care about heroin as a scourge. Otherwise, Songs for Our Mothers indicates Fat White Family still want to annoy you, but they're only going to put real effort into it for so long. AMG.

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Fat White Family - Champagne Holocaust 2013

The Fat White Family would doubtless be appalled if someone called their music folk-rock, but there is a very real "sitting around the campfire" feel to their debut album, Champagne Holocaust. In this case, the musicians are sitting around the campfire because they're too drunk, shabby, and bloody-minded to go anywhere else as they meander through their exercises in primitive blues-based noise. The image is clearest on acoustic-based numbers like "Garden of the Numb" and "Who Shot Lee Oswald?," but even when the Fat White Family strap on their electric guitars for the relatively poppy "Is It Raining in Your Mouth?" or fire up their drum machine on "Cream of the Young," this music has a raw, shambling feeling, as if several of the musicians could keel over and pass out from too much cheap gin at any given moment. Not unlike their kindred spirits the Country Teasers, the Fat White Family trade in deliberately crude music -- there are several moments here that make it clear they can play better than this, but choose not to -- and have no qualms about offending their audience, whether they're cheerfully discussing killing your kids during a visit to Disneyland or challenging your mom's sense of sexual propriety. (By comparison, their celebration of their own leather fetishism sounds more playful than they probably intended.) In short, Champagne Holocaust sounds like the work of foul-mouthed, ill-tempered drunks, but that's also clearly what they had in mind, and in its own way this album is an off-putting success -- it's hardly everyone's cup of tea, but the Fat White Family wanted nothing less. Call it satire, and don't play it around your friends who complain about those Juggalo kids who hang out by the convenience store. AMG.

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