Today, the band share a gloriously exuberant video for ‘Bullet Of Dignity’, the latest track to be taken from the album. The video, directed by Niall Trask features the band in an AI homage to image creators Pierre & Gilles, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard. ‘Bullet of Dignity’ follows the recent release of the album track, ‘Religion For One’.
To Lias Saoudi, Forgiveness Is Yours, “is about life as eternal contingency…about no longer suspecting, but knowing that this shit will never get any easier…in fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse, your body’s going to go into decay and the people you love will slowly start dropping dead around you…but somehow, you’ve smashed enough of your expectations thus far in life, you’re sort of fine with it…you accept it”.
Its twelve tracks come on like a sideways state of the nation tirade, a bulletin of indignities chronicling times spinning wildly out of joint yet happily, for all its creators’ sufferings (founding member Saul Adamczewski permanently and acrimoniously left the band during its recording), Forgiveness Is Yours is an embarrassment of delights.
Right from their earliest days, Fat White Family have instinctively grasped the long-neglected power of myth in rock’n’roll, the necessity of giving people something (or nothing) to believe in. In a drab monoculture of play-it-safe pop careerists, Fat White Family carry the sacred flame. A band with the power to inspire, they are vehemently punk not in sound but in spirit, and their live shows are the stuff of urban legend — fervid whispers told of raw shamanic force, unbridled ferocity, shocking acts of transgression and self-abasement.
We can only take Lias at his word when he says, “The overarching aesthetic themes at work here are torpor and further torpor still.” 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 realise that the damage is irreparable, all truces are fleeting, and the game was never worth the candle. 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.
