Luckily, this is not a problem the actual Viagra Boys have. The images and characters on Viagr Aboys are sharp, often showing unexpected depth. “I hate almost everything that I see and I just wanna disappear,” goes the refrain of lead single “Man Made Of Meat,” one of the poppiest tracks in the band’s discography. The misanthropy of these lyrics is meant to be shared by the crowd. There’s a sense, at least on the big, anthemic tracks, that we’ve all gone a little mad, and that mocking the lunatics is a little less fun when no barb sticks. Instead, Viagr Aboys turns inward, plumbing the lives of specific characters with surprising sensitivity.
Two moments in the album manage to be plaintive and vulnerable without sacrificing the most fun, disgusting parts of the Boys. Album closer “River King” finds serenity in mundane time spent with a loved one. The simple piano line underscoring the idiosyncratic descriptions of spoiled Chinese food recalls, implausibly, Lana Del Rey. “Medicine For Horses,” another “being alive right now sucks” type song, distinguishes itself by daring to imagine a future where domestic bliss could actually be blissful. “Go ahead, break my neck, take the fluid from my spine,” Murphy sings, hoping he can be preserved and thawed like a perverse Walt Disney. A wife is the only thing that can keep him from thinking about the plains of North America, where a man could live an honest life with a seemingly endless future splayed out before him.
But fear not; the Viagra Boys are not getting soft. These plains are one of the few hyperfixations on the album that get to remain a symbol. Often, Murphy’s narrator can hardly keep himself from listing facts he gleaned from a Wikipedia page on whatever topic he brought up. “Do you even know the difference between the swamp and an ancient bog?” he asks in “The Bog Body,” another paean to a person preserved from the time in which they belonged. In “You N33d Me,” our narrator “can drop a lot of interesting facts about Europe in the 1950s” while consuming 15 to 25 beers. This kind of guy is obsessed mostly with being a winner, and he wins by creating little contests and deciding all the rules so they favor him.
While the band is certainly gelled and energetic—Oskar Carls’ saxophone work adds a particularly important manic quality to their work—Viagr Aboys feels like the Sebastian Murphy show. His voice has the husky baritone of an old-school country music star, but it’s his delivery that really elevates every song, keeping the onslaught of testosterone from growing stale. “Congratulations on your new job,” he slurs toward the top of “Waterboy” before his benevolence turns on a dime: “You fucking rat!” When he’s not playing, the guy brings “a type of vibe to the party that nobody likes.” He’s performing mommy’s special boy, outright demanding attention as you watch him do his little dance. “I’m standing outside of the McDonalds, I’m flexing my muscles ’til I explode,” he sings, and you can hear the veins popping in his forehead. The over-the-top machismo fails to mask the narrator’s obvious insecurity, which actually makes him endearing.
It’s a tough needle to thread, but the Viagra Boys manage it mostly successfully by inviting us to laugh first at them so we can then laugh with them. This is, ironically, the exact kind of confidence that their characters lack, and the confidence needed to make their lives suck a little bit less. Instead, what the band’s subjects reach for, mistakenly, is arrogance. The characters in their lyrics will never learn any better. They may wish they were living in a different time, but for all their flaws, there is no doubt that they are completely, explosively alive right now.
