The Viagra Boys are an absurdist response to the rose-tinted, overproduced, banal homogenization of most popular modern music: A necessary neutron bomb.
They’re Sweden’s newest musical hellraisers, and to virgin ears, regardless of any musical taste, they’ll certainly make an impression; more of a red hot branding on the first-timer’s innocent brain. The Viagra Boys are a product of late-stage digital cynicism that says your government hates you, fact is fictitious, life’s online, the world’s burning, kids are screwed, there’s no one to look up to, nothing to look forward to, so why try harder?
That’s darkness from which the Viagra Boys come storming, strung out and cackling, drinking adrenochrome, and waving around six-shooters.
The Viagra Boys are not pop music. Not just in the genre sense of the word, not just that you won’t hear them on the radio or find them topping any charts (which you won’t), but their very existence is a cracked-nail middle finger to any standards or ideals. They don’t make music for you. They do it for themselves; if you don’t like it, too bad.
There is a true uniqueness to them. While nothing that comes from the Viagra Boys is necessarily pleasant, it’s genuine. Depressed, messy, ugly, irreverent, mean-spirited, and borderline misanthropic, but it’s true, at least to the band. So even when they go off on some mad tangent like “Best In Show I&II,” which detail an intergalactic dog show, it never feels kitschy because they’ve so flippantly committed to the bit that it’s impossible not to be intoxicated by the stark madness of it all.
The Viagra Boys aren’t just a band of musicians, but a band of grave robbers. Carving up the corpses of old records, stripping them for parts, and rearranging them into mangled, musical Frankensteins. The violence of hardcore, the industrial soundscapes, the post-punk milieu, the out-of-tune free-jazz solos, the bluesy rhythms and the electronic melodies. Vocalist and songwriter Sebastian ‘Seb’ Murphy slings, sputters and slurs his lyrics with a graphic, otherworldly, Burroughs-ian perversity, Bukowski malaise, and political iconoclasm ála Frank Zappa or Johnny Rotten.
Nothing is guaranteed to satisfy or sound like what came before. The band cranks its rusty gears from album to album, song to song. The music of the Viagra Boys isn’t about the hooks and choruses, it’s about the pictures they paint and the stories they tell. They are dadaist art at its best; absurd, disturbed, disaffected, sardonic, irreverent, and full of blood and vigor. They confound their audience into understanding and once they get their hooks in you, it’s hard to turn your back. Once you get it, everything else seems pasśe.
The Viagra Boys make sonic violence, and from that violence comes great music, real music; mad genius. They create a vacuum of noise and whatever you plug into that vacuum is what you’ll get out, which is what separates great music from the fruit-stripe-gum for your ears you get on the radio or the charts.
If you’re looking for misanthropy or societal criticism, you’ll find it (listen to their most recent album, Cave World, describing societal collapse and man’s devolution back into monkeys), if you’re looking for personal struggle or down and out anthems you’ll find them (“Into the Sun”, “Just Like You”), if you’re looking for druggie psychosis you’ll find it ( “Research Chemicals”, “I Feel Alive”), if you’re looking for misfit love you’ll find it (“To the Country” “In Spite of Ourselves”), and if you’re looking for fun time anarchy you’ll find it (“Punk Rock Loser”, “Ain’t Nice”, “Don’t Remember That”).
From the very beginning, the Viagra Boys have had an attitude. An attitude that takes no prisoners, burns the book, pushes into the red, and goes hurdling over the edge into the rock n roll abyss. An attitude that balks with its boozy, black-toothed grin: you’re either in on the joke, or you are the joke.
It’s likely the Viagra Boys won’t be your cup of tea, they are an acquired taste that may or may not require some chemical imbalances to enjoy. But, if the boring, soft, institutional indifference of pop music that lasts less than three minutes leaves you feeling less than satisfied…try the Viagra Boys.
