By Genre: Hard Rock, Post-Post-Punk
Favorite Tracks: “Baby Criminal,” “Troglodyte,” “Punk Rock Loser,” “Ain’t No Thief”
While the wider music listening world has been mostly preoccupied with the wellspring of young post-punk bands flowing out of the British Isles for the last five to six years or so, a different, mutant version of the same sounds has been taking form on the other side of the North Sea. The third full-length record for Stockholm’s Viagra Boys is a singular moment of triumph for a group that has long shown flashes and moments of brilliance but never, until now, put it all together into such a vibrant and cohesive package. On CAVE WORLD, the straightforward punch and venom of STREET WORMS comes into balance with the messy sprawl of WELFARE JAZZ, creating an album that is danceable yet fiery, chaotic yet focused, topically pointed yet always darkly comic.
Composed as a six-piece, Viagra Boys are large for a punk band, but use their instrumental breadth to their advantage by concocting a sonic palette that feels vaguely reminiscent of any number of influences yet wholly unique to them in total. Jumping from post-punk and new wave to slacker indie to electronic rave, to even strains of alt-country, they harness a churning and motor-powered rhythm section supporting a swirling mixture of squawking saxophone, fuzzed out synthesizers, and textured guitars that manages to simultaneously anchor but also disorient each of their songs. This lurching, off-kilter sound provides the perfect canvas for the outsize charisma and macabre, deadpan wit of frontman Sebastian Murphy.
Murphy trafficks in a comedic style that will be deeply familiar to fans of artists like Alex Cameron or the great Randy Newman, personifying some of society’s most objectionable characters in an effort to unmask their specific brand of depravity. In this case, those characters are variations on the forum-poisoned and the QAnon alt-right, the archetype of the modern day school shooter. “Baby Criminal” and “Troglodyte” function as studies on the origins and self-destructive behavior patterns of disturbed young men on the Internet: “He says he don’t believe in science / He thinks that all the news is fake / And late at night he sits on his computer / And writes about the things he hates.” On songs like “Punk Rock Loser” and “Big Boy,” Murphy more fully embodies the deranged narcissism of these same figures, almost drunkenly deadpanning refrains like “I’m not your average punk rock loser / Yeah I’m a savage, I’m really cool.”
The ridiculousness comes to a head on perhaps the album’s best song, “Ain’t No Thief,” which finds Murphy donning his Tim Robinson hot dog costume as he earnestly insists that, no, he did not steal your extremely specific custom-made lighter from your birthday party, he just happens to have one too, a hilarious premise for a song that even takes on a Pynchonesque postmodern comedic bent, if you imagine that the narrator is actually telling the genuine truth. An American-born Swedish emigrant with a hybrid accent performing with an exaggerated American affect, Murphy’s vocal delivery itself only feeds the humor baked into his lyrics–just listen to literally any time he draws out the word “man,” almost begging the listener to heed his increasingly unhinged warnings about the microchips and creepy crawlies in the vaccines and the children growing animal hair instead of baby hair and you can feel the difference but only if you touch it!
CAVE WORLD makes for an extremely energetic and engaging listen from front to back. It’s well-paced and ripe with laughs, but the most impressive part of the whole package is the way in which it presents its characters not even necessarily as bizarre oddities, but as fully fledged members of human society. Taking cues from people like Channel 5’s Andrew Callaghan (who Murphy has explicitly referenced as an influence on this record), Viagra Boys present the outlandish extremes of the world’s right wing not so much as objects to be looked down upon, but largely represents them in their own words and finds ways to musically highlight the insanity therein.
At times the record feels eerily prescient, like the verse towards the end of “Return To Monke” which deals intimately with the cleanup after “a murder takes place in Japan,” CAVE WORLD having released on the same day that former right-wing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was gunned down in the street by a man with a homemade shotgun. If there is one thing that this album seems to want people to understand, it is that the people depicted in its songs are not just bad apples or lone gunmen; they are legion. Their numbers grow by the day as the alienation and dispossession of American youth grows deeper all the time, and it’s far past time to start directly addressing the root issues that cause people to seek answers in all the wrong places, to directly and concretely unmask the terminally online.
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