Lias Saoudi and co return with their first since 2019’s Serfs Up, one with that despite the troubled departure of founding member Saul Adamczewski during its creation, is an entertainingly sharp, ironic, aesthetic, literary release packed with stylish reference points, soundscapes and tunes. Saoudi’s recent co-penned the memoir Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure with writer Adelle Stripe feels like a forerunner to this album – clever, funny, self-referential and self-deprecatory, but also filled with playfulness of style, at times channelling Alan Vega’s of Suicide’s spoken word-style delivery and those wild, pumping, anarchic synths and rhythmic sound, not to mention oodles of guitars, flutes, saxophones and his own vocal delivery which leaps between parodied hifalutin perfect diction and crazed, insanity and anarchy. From tongue-in-cheek opener The Archivist, to the experimental jazz of Visions of Pain, the gradually ever more menacing sounds and spoken-word Today Your Become a Man (telling the story of his brother’s traumatic circumcision), to Bullet of Dignity, Work, Religion For One or the dark, thrumming Feed The Horse, or the more acoustic ballad John Lennon (about the Beatle, but perhaps also with a dig at Adamczewski), there’s a wealth of clever jokes, passion and musical inventiveness here. Who knows the band might go next, or if there will be more, but if this is meant to captures potent, creative chaos steeped in irony and a big schism, it certainly succeeds. Out on Domino.
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