Inciting blood-flow to all the right places

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that the Stockholm post-punkers, Viagra Boys, represent impotency in some capacity. Listen to any one of their songs and that notion is instantly nullified. They are not flaccid. These guys flaunt beaucoup confidence and poise, and are more virile than any other out on the market right now. Self-endorsers of a brand of sound that’s entirely their own, they aren’t unaware of it and the puissance that comes along with it. And they’re only beginning. Although they’re still in their infant stage, they’ve made considerable waves in their short five-year span thus far. Now, they’ve released their sophomore LP, Welfare Jazz, for the public’s listening displeasure.

It barely qualifies as jazz, if it all. Admittedly, there’s sax on the album, but then again there was also sax on the Stooges’ Fun House. It actually spans across several genres without actually situating itself in any at all, flirting with vague semblances of pop, country, punk, even orchestra. There is no one constant throughout. Most contain sax and effect-laden guitar and many have infectiously catchy (and, juicy) basslines, especially on “Into the Sun,” where it druggily slugs as hazy psychedelic guitar plays behind it, frontman Sebastian Murphy singing in a hoarse, dirt-flecked imploratory to a loved one he wishes to win back by promises of ending the bad ways over which he lost his love. An overuse not aleatory.

Murphy is found either in a tongue-in-cheek country drawl (á la Lux Interior of The Cramps), asinine crooning or straight screaming into the mic, inducing microphone bleed at every utterance. The guy is absolutely deranged and he revels in it, and anyone half as mad as he is has a sense of humor. Murphy’s particular brand? Sarcasm. That’s where the country drawl and country lyricism come from in “To the Country” and “In Spite of Ourselves.” Rather than eulogizing these country elements by inclusion, he recasts them in a sardonic light. “In Spite of Ourselves” is part disconsolate, lone-cowboy tune and part mock-poignant, sometimes using space-tech sound effects, and making use of tawdry, crass jokes (being caught red-handed sniffing underwear or essentializing alcohol) and love-dovey affirmations all in a duet. It still has its pathos though it’s meant to be funny, which makes it so brilliant–its suspended perfectly between moving and mocking.

The strangest track on the album is, without a doubt, “Secret Canine Agent.” They breathlessly follow the surreptitious movements of the titular dog in their caricatured version of a spy song. It still retains the mysterious sophistication of the classic spy song but uses a mesmerizing guitar echo that syncs to an out-of-whack sax in the chorus. Murphy even barks in it.

But “Creatures” tops the former track’s strangeness with its own measure of freakishness. With glittery synth and an easy-listening, complaisant structure, it’s the closest these guys can get to a pop anthem, but of course the lyrical content is gutted out and replaced with something sardonic. It profiles the lives of underwater derelicts that trade in copper, stolen bikes, electronics or shiny things with lots of buttons on them to subsist in their lives “way under water/ down at the bottom.”

And once it seemingly can’t get much more insane, “I Feel Alive” tops it all. It delves into slow and swaggering saloon piano as Murphy hysterically cries out that he’s come too close to death. He doesn’t want to die but it’s so exhilarating to come so close, as he dithers between the joy of death and the giddiness of dodging it: an insane, irreconcilable vicissitude that, near the end of the song, the listener begins to feel Murphy’s plight and delight as their own.

Viagra Boys are nihilistic disruptors, but ones with a cosmic mission of missionlessness that goes beyond the bellicosity of their rebel-without-a-cause sound and sensibility. If you go to the band’s website, you’re greeted by Bob the Fortune Dog (their version of a Magic Eight-ball) who is anti-helpful to any user’s query as a news crawl moves above with phrases like “Enter your credit card details now!” and “Support Capitalism Today, Buy Merchnadise! [sic].” They are driven in their drive to drive others from others’ drives.

Yet in spite of all the esteeming, there’s a sense the band still has so much more to say, as if they ended Welfare Jazz on a luring ellipsis. There’s a sense they’re holding back, not saying all that they have to say, reserving their energy for something better yet. There will be another album out soon by them. And it will throb.