Fat White Family – Serfs Up!

Description

19.04.19 Serfs Up! is Fat White Family’s third album and their firstfor new label Domino. It marks the most gratifying and unexpectedcreative volte face in recent musical history. Having released theirsecond album, Songs For Our Mothers in January 2016, core-membersLias and Nathan Saoudi relocated to Sheffield and set about writing thealbum. Joined by co-conspirator Saul Adamczewski and recorded at theirown Champzone studios in the Attercliffe area of the city, Serfs Up! wasfinished in late autumn 2018 with the help of long-time collaborator,Liam D. May and features a guest appearance from Baxter Dury on Tastes Good With The Money.Serfs Up! is a lush and masterful work, lascivious andpersonal. Tropical, sympathetic and monumental. It invites the listenerin rather than repel them through wilful abrasion. Fat White Family havebroken previous default patterns of behaviour, and as such their thirdalbum heralds a new day dawning.Gregorian chants, jackboot glam beats, string flourishes,sophisticated and lush cocktail exotica, electro funk and the twinspirits of Alan Vega and Afrika Bambaataa punctuate the record atvarious junctures, while the dramatic production of Feet is as immaculately-rendered as Hounds of Love – era Kate Bush. The dirt is still there of course, but scrape it away and you’ll find a purring engine, gleaming chrome.Echoing within the arrangements throughout are traces of blissed-out60s Tropicalia, Velvets / Bowie sleaze-making and star-gazing, 80sdigital dancehall, David Axelrod-style easy listening, joyous Pet ShopBoys synth crescendos, acid house, post-PIL dub, metropolitan murderballads, doom-disco and mouth-gurning, slow-mo psychedelia so by thetime it comes to a close only a fool would deny that Serfs Up! issomething very special. No longer is unadulterated music malevolenceFat White Family’s stock in trade; this is cultivated music for thehead, the heart. For tomorrow’s unborn children.Where once they soundtracked a grubby Britain of vape shops, FrayBentos dinners and blackened tin-foil, a crepuscular comedown realmstalked by Shipman, Goebbels and Mark E. Smith, Fat White Family nowinhabit another cosmos entirely. Serfs Up! is the product of aband of outlaws reborn. Few but themselves could have forecast it: FatWhite Family survived. Fat White Family got wise. Fat White Family got sophisticated.LP – Heavyweight Black Vinyl.