SONGS For Our Mothers, despite its (almost certainly ironic) title, does not contain a single song I would even consider showing my own mum.

Fat White Family are famed for their raucous live shows, which have at various points, allegedly, included faeces, dead pigs’ heads and masturbation. Their music is no different – one does not feel comfortable listening to Songs For Our Mothers.

Musically, Fat White Family take their cues from both late-70s post-punk like Wire and This Heat, and angular, outsider garage rock such as Captain Beefheart. Despite this relatively dated primary influence, Fat White Family throw in enough bits of gothic rock, psych and krautrock to distinguish their music from its primary influence and definitely sound like 2016 as opposed to a relic of the past.
Unsettling right from the off, odd post-punk number ‘Whitest Boy on the Beach’ builds from a galloping bassline and erupts into an almost operatic vocal three-quarters of the way in.

Post-punk swagger is continued on the claustrophobic ‘Satisfied’, another track that is relatively reserved (by Fat White Family standards at least), before going all out in its refrain of “satisfied, satisfied, I’m so easily satisfied”, repeating it until it becomes something resembling a hook.

The creepy ‘Love is the Crack’ haunts the listener with its eerie constraint, never erupting the way the first two tracks do.

Not content with simply being unsettling, the band find many different ways in which to disconcert the listener. Tracks like ‘Duce’ and ‘We Must Learn to Rise’ are pure, unrepentant noise. The former is somewhat reminiscent of The Stooges’ track ‘We Will Fall’ from their 1969 debut, coming after two more upbeat tracks with an almost cult-ish dirge. ‘We Must Learn to Rise’ cumulates in an extremely unusual, but somewhat fitting interpolation of the Winkies’ chant from The Wizard of Oz, ‘all we own, we owe her…’.
Conversely, ‘Lebensraum‘, ‘Hits Hits Hits’ and ‘When the Shipman Decides’ sound more like off-kilter pop songs – if not for their bizarre and uncomfortable ambience, both tracks could sound almost pleasant. It puts this reviewer in mind of 1960s psychedelic rock groups like Love and The Honeycombs who produced music that sounded idyllic on the surface but had sinister musical undertones.

Another delight is the industrial-tinged ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’, which takes its listener on a musical journey as it slowly adds more layers to its main melody in its verses, before exploding in a mesh of buzzsaw guitars, oddly dulcet vocals and jarring keyboards.

The album’s final track, ‘Goodbye Goebbels‘, takes a somewhat stripped back approach, mostly relying on an acoustic guitar line. Most similar to previously mentioned off-kilter pop tracks, it works as a menacing country-esque number.

Despite the album having fairly apparent influences, it never feels unoriginal, taking all these influences and melding them into something new entirely.

Fat White Family will be an interesting band to watch in 2016 and beyond. Songs For Our Mothers is even more accomplished and depraved than its predecessor Champagne Holocaust, which was both of those things in of itself.

Fat White Family’s third album adding even more layers to their sound is a promising prospect indeed.