Oct 2

Oct 2 Album Review: Viagra Boys - Street Worms

Viagra Boys are a post-punk sextet from Stockholm, although you could easily assume that they’re Americans in listening to them with no prior knowledge. This is not only due to their devotion to writing post-punk songs in the ilk of The Men or Parquet Courts, or because singer Sebastian Murphy affects a Southern American drawl throughout, but because of the blues that is a distinctive vein running throughout new album Street Worms. This is infused through their ace-in-the-hole saxophone use and also Seb’s tales of woeful characters in each song – although these are not just down-on-their-luck losers, but mentally unwell societal outcasts.

In modern rock we think of the basement as a mythical space where teenage friendships blossom and perhaps early musical ideas germinate in adolescent jam sessions; but for Viagra Boys’ opening track, ‘Down in the Basement’ is where a wife follows her cheating husband watching him get up to no good dressed in latex. This frantic rock barrage is rife with blurred bass lines and brass ejaculations, and you might miss all the details of this tale of seedy unfaithfulness you’re not paying attention. It's an unfaltering introduction to an album full of unapologetic immorality.

The depraved and descending post-punk of ‘Down in the Basement’ sets the blueprint for Viagra Boys throughout most of the album, and on some tracks it feels a bit repetitive at times. The factor that distinguishes these tracks from each other are the odd and uncouth characters being described – if you can catch all of the details. It’s perhaps best that the story flies past on second track ‘Slow Learner’, which tells the unsavoury and heartless tale of a mentally retarded person who “was in high school ‘til he was 22.” On the other end of the scale is ‘Frogstrap’, which is a paranoid garble about an amphibian extra-terrestrial that we’re still trying to decode after countless listens. ‘Shrimp Shack’ is your classic tale of huffing formaldehyde and mentally surfing with "your mom." Viagra Boys duly provide their trademark gliding, rip-roaring and heady brass-infused grooves to each of these, and it seems to be just as adept at capturing the spirit of each of these unusual anecdotes.

If there’s any connective tissue between the different vagabonds that populate Street Worms, then it seems to be the fact that they never got involved in organised athletics. On the barn burning ‘Sports', Seb lists these pastimes at random, and sings them as if they might are completely alien concepts to him ("Ping pong/ rugby ball/ wiener dog/ skiing down the beach") – he’s much more familiar with “getting high in the morning and buying things off the internet.” The lack of sports in his life is touched on again in the album’s moody centrepiece ‘Just Like You’. Here he has two visions of himself – one as a successful society man with “a life without upset family members,” and another where he wakes up from that dream “with the same fucked up people that surround me.” Torn between these two versions of himself, they seem to look at each other and be thankful that they didn’t end up ‘Just Like You’. Here Viagra Boys show more diversity in their sound, with a low-lit and percussively shuffling track, punctuated by soulful sax scronks that give the song an undeniable groove and depth.

The other slow track in the collection is ‘Worms’, where Viagra Boys embolden their sound with more woodwinds to great effect. In this gloomy atmosphere Seb dreams of the death of all his friends and family and then professes “the same worms that eat me will some day eat you too.” Considering the unhappy, low-life, shit-luck situations that his characters seem to endlessly be running into, we desperately hope that isn’t true. However, if they're like the songs on Viagra Boys' Street Worms, then we're happy to let them nibble on us for a little while.