Chapter 2 of Viagra Boys: Viagra Men. Now 50% more boring!

Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz (2020)

Maturation is a very intricate, intimate concept. And it becomes even more intimate when it is put to music, especially to punk music. Some artists and bands try to pursue their bombastic qualities as long as they can write catchy riffs and bass grooves, others evolve their sound to match the change in their minds (and arms). Viagra Boys fail in both directions, releasing a second album over-flooded with new ideas of questionable quality. But first things first.

The singles to Welfare Jazz were not only promising – they were truly evolutionary for the band’s sound as they began to explore new wave grounds whilst sticking to the original energetic nature of the band. “Creatures” for example, was one of my favourite songs of 2020 with its soaring refrain ‘”We are the creatures / down at the bottom“, exploring the sombre theme of addicts’ fate which is familiar to (most) of the Viagra Boys’ members. The John Prine cover “In Spite of Ourselves” is a duet featuring Amy Taylor of Melbourne-based pub ragers Amyl and the Sniffers, and the song increased the expectations even more as the band explored a distorted country folk sound with interestingly demented delays.

And so I was absolutely crushed to realise that Welfare Jazz does very little to actually fulfill these expectations. Plowing more into the ‘art’ side of art punk and introducing a lot of influences in one fell swoop does not automatically make your album better, and here the results (plural, because it is far from being one coherent album) sound bloated and unfocused. With a production that is now a lot cleaner than on their fantastic debut, Welfare Jazz feels incredibly blurry and overstretched on the uneven ride through 13 tracks the album is offering. 

“Ain’t Nice” is an amazing opener, but what follows next… instead of adding to the whole spectre of sonic diversity of the album, the interludes “Cold Play”, “This Old Dog” and “Best in Show II” just slow it down and smash it into different pieces for no known reason. On top of that, these pieces itself don’t provide enough grooves and energy for you to want to come back to them solely for the ideas they are offering. The spoken word part of “Toad” is alright, but the country inspired vocals in the second part of the song on top of a rhythm part extremely reminiscent of the debut album doesn’t help the track in general. The same can be said of “Into the Sun” – what is this, an acoustic Pantera rip-off? And the feeling of a significantly bad recycling going on only increases as “6 Shooter” starts, with an almost exact copy of sonic patterns that were introduced on “Shrimp Shack” and “Amphetanarchy” from the Street Worms LP, only to be interrupted by a strange middle part thrown in for no goddamn reason, and then to increase again as the same patterns (more or less jazzy) continue. Should I say that a major part of “Girls & Boys” is oddly similar to “Sports”, only worse?

The second leg of Welfare Jazz is much more captivating than the first one by the way. “Secret Canine Agent” and “To the Country” being the two completely opposite poles of the record (and also two of the shortest tracks here – if we don’t count the stupid interludes), are the only non-singles highlights of the album, both of them equally dynamic and menacing in their own way. 

“We wrote these songs at a time when I had been in a long-term relationship, taking drugs every day, and being an asshole,” Sebastian Murphy said in one of the interviews preceding the album. Maybe that’s the point of Welfare Jazz, that tries its best to be the reiteration of previous works and is filled with a bunch of ideas that are new to the band. But like in a destructive long-term relationship, it only feels boring, confusing and tortured.

by Alexey