The second Viagra Boys album begins where the Swedish post-punk quintet’s debut, 2018’s Street Worms, left off: a churning, fuzzy bassline, sputtering electronics, and Sebastian Murphy declaiming in blackly comic fashion about his inadequacies: “I ain’t nice!” The whole point of Viagra Boys has appeared to be that they aren’t nice: live, they are pulverisingly intense, and Murphy – heavily tattooed, and both skinny and pot-bellied – projects an air of disdainful menace. Beneath the apparent squalor of songs like Research Chemicals, though, there was always purpose: attacking hypocrisy, celebrating underdogs.
For a band so musically single-minded, a second album was always going to present a challenge: how to expand on their ferocious attack without turning into a caricature of themselves. In those terms, Welfare Jazz is a partial success. Creatures finds Murphy again celebrating lowlife, but it’s far more musically limber than one might expect from Viagra Boys, driven by electronic bass, and with keyboards that sparkle rather than squelch; it’s almost slinky. Into the Sun and I Feel Alive attempt a kind of noxious blues, but where the latter is both melodic and tense, the former is just formless and dull. A duet with Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers on John Prine’s In Spite of Ourselves sounds like a good idea on paper; on record it comes across as the kind of Americana parody that was so popular on John Peel’s show in the cowpunk era. The rest, largely, is as you would expect (and likely hope for), though it’s a mystery why 6 Shooter, a Stoogey thrillride, is an instrumental.
The issue here isn’t intent; it’s execution. But when Viagra Boys are completely focused, they’re still fantastic, and don’t miss them when they can return to the stage.
