Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz

What a day at the races.

We got the local ecosystem lined up at the starting line. Species ranging from leg counts and pedal structures in order of their last meal’s size. We got dogs of all sorts. Dogs like street urchins, with bald spots on their elbows. Dogs with broken backs that slink around to the front when the race turns neck and neck. Dogs etcetera on a Seabiscuit trip. Then we got amphibians, look to be on amphetamines. They croak like they are coked. Toads blend into the dirt and the frogs stick to it. Come to find there’s the sapien sort as well. Boys. Girls. They lallygag upright to a false start and skin their knees midway through the gallop. No one’s running like the wind, though a choice canine has worked his way to an incognito breeze. Lips peeled back now, reveal teeth at the final stretch. Two brutes break the tape and think themselves for winners. They are talking big gulps of sky, trying to lick a seed of moisture in the air. Every speckled spectator throws folds of bills down in defeat and they make the sound of leather belts. What a spectacle. Game addicts thumb the brim of their fedoras in disbelief. Girlfriends neglect the lipstick squatters on their left canine cuspids. The brutes figured themselves the favorites and wonder what the bark is for. They look down to see the culprit, the real winner. He was too small to break the tape, he just fixed right under it. He’d had time to order a Roy Rogers and a whore before the brutes made second and third. The crustacean was already floating up to the podium penthouse, and his summery drink began to break first sweat.

TASTE THE SHRIMP!

Welfare Jazz is the overdog. It’s the big sell the Viagra Boys have been waiting for since they narrowed their eyes. Maybe your favorite song of theirs isn’t on it. Maybe you prefer “Research Chemicals” or “Sports”, but the songs on here show you what they’ve really got. They decided that the central nervous system stimulants could take a back seat on the subject matter and make focus by way of sound, and they got walls of it. The mechanics seem more polished than ever before, and there is no room for free space in the mix. Though there may be a lot going on at times, never does feel crowded or overcooked. The production stays clean and professed while giving simultaneous nods to the old ways of archaic storage unit maraudery. They’ve also showed that they can leave the driving beat for really anything of their choosing, to unanimous favor. That’s why this album could be misconstrued as variety hour at the antique horrorshow. There’s these skits along the way that feel like a homage to Trout Mask Replica, with saxophonic diversions that tap you on the shoulder and appear at the other side, and spoken word passages that go over like “Hobo Chang Ba.” Just as well, they’ve also reminded us that they can keep reinventing what made them unique in the first place, punching in the signature wave-core drive with callous determination of bass and whir of fiendish synthesizer. Then of course things can get secretly real, where they’re trying to show you what they got but they disguise it under a wry smile. At times the vocals seem arguably passionate enough to be approaching soul, something you might have figured lead singer Sebastian Murphy wrought of. I hope they step further into both directions and do a bloody split. I can see Murphy really opening himself up and I can see him in a reflective puddle complete with chunks. Both make for a good record.

Critics liked this album, but I still think they got it all wrong. They’re calling it country because of a few implementations. These same people would point at a dried-up lizard in a can of pop and call it country. The Black Lips are country. The Rolling Stones are country. Viagra Boys are just getting a taste for the salt lick. Maybe they’ll run with it, maybe they’ll skip to their Lou, but right now it’s neither said nor done. That being done, there’s a country leg at the end of the album that points in an infinite direction for our Stockholm boys. The last song to close the album is maybe the best interpretation of a cover since Johnny Cash did America. It’s a cover of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves” featuring Amy Taylor from Australia’s current reigning punk band, Amyl and The Sniffers. Drums are coming up on a fix and the guitars are edging around the wired glow. They get caught so they drop out into an acoustic day job only to come in and out of the conscience like a brännvin drunk. Now the duet’s on and there’s nothing you can do but shuffle weird to the junk sick morning and tip what’s not moth-eaten of your hat to the end of a life and the birth of another. It’s twice the length of the original. It’s darn tootin’ in the mirror.

That’s the short and long of it really. This review arrives late because I have a mental fixation, much like that of an idiot savant, where I must listen to an album I preordered on vinyl first before I can listen to it digitally or much less review it. The wax took its sweet time getting here. That’s all well and good, I’m just glad the postal workers that took it out and played with it didn’t get snuff stains on the hand-painted insert. They must’ve enjoyed it too, because I opened it up along with a hand-written letter that read and still reads:

“TASTE THE SHRIMP!”

Viagra Boys
Welfare Jazz
[Year0001]