Review Summary: The world as plasticine dance-punk in a funhouse mirror
The endless self-awareness of Viagra Boys is that which experiences the world as a funhouse hall of mirrors. The world is merely a reflection of the self, and a distortion to the point that there is no original which can be referred back to. The performativity is the whole point, frontman Sebastian Murphy’s slovenly charisma is as much the inverted elements of performative masculinity as performance art as an authentic persona, like a postmodern Bukowski opening his maw to let in the whole of hypercapitalist garbage culture just to let it spew back out of him again. It’s a neverending kynical act, his beer-gutted, often shirtless, trash-tattooed appearance in the youtube thumbnail a mockery of the image of the commodified body that so saturates the digital world. There’s no real resolution to the irony, the undistorted self Murphy’s looking at is that of a body driven into a grinning wallow in the morass of base desire: food, sex and shrimp. Isn’t that just the perfect theme to dance to?
The world of internet culture is a particular target of their playful nihilism, and also their playground, as it has been in the past. The pisstake self-awareness is another aspect of their funhouse sensibility, opener Man Made of Meat spitting caustic references to Onlyfans and internet feet photography, not so much to moralize, but again to hold up that funhouse mirror as though to say “hey, guys, isn’t this all just incredibly weird?”. Here,as throughout their entire discography, they’re not looking for answers. The experts tried that decades ago, and look what good it did. Rather, the late-capitalist freakshow is now the playground, the object of derision, the mud-wallow. The world is awash in takes, opinions, views, rhetoric, and without certainty, except the puerile joy of dance and illicit substances.
The bangers on
viagr aboys don't quite ever hit the level of Ain’t No Thief, but that track was such a step above anything on
Cave World that we could be forgiven for assuming that track would be their absolute peak. In fact, viagr aboys is a remarkably consistent affair that invites attention and dance-steps, but not by swinging for the fences. Instead, the band commits to a steady churn of tightly written songs, each one grounded in better hooks, tighter grooves, and a more coherent sense of pacing. They’ve settled into their own language, and while it may be spoken in all-caps carried by promethazine and 7-Up, it’s still fluent and deliberate. There’s an irony, of course, in how a band this polished—this fully realized in tone and execution—can still pretend to be the sonic embodiment of conceptual chaos, especially when you watch their polished, low-concept music videos. But maybe that’s the trick: you have to know exactly what you’re doing if you want to sound like you don’t give a damn. Elsewhere, the disco-punk, drug-core aesthetic rides a little closer to the rails, ditching some of the old randomness (Murphy’s not going on an irony-steeped rant about adenochrome conspiracies here) for songwriting that actually sticks. The opener and lead single Man Made of Meat sets the stage for the whole album, and gives us a heady cliff-notes of the Boys’ whole ethos of polished and tightly wound dance-sleaze. Dirty Boyz is a sun-baked day-drunk stumble down filthy streets, the skewering of hydration “culture” is amusing over Waterboy’s take on All Time Low-type melodies, and Best In Show IV is a handclap-driven stumble down a fever-dream rabbit hole drug rant. An out-and-out melodic Marcy Playground ripoff on Pyramid of Health for some reason, whether played straight or tongue in cheek who can say, is the only misstep I can pull out of here, unless its that the whole polish of this thing gives me pause as to whether I can really buy any of this. But that, on some level, certainly seems to be the point.
The art of trying to say smart things with dumb words has always been Viagra Boys’ bitcoin in trade. Beneath the slurred jokes and sleazy dance rhythms is a razor-wire awareness of a culture eating itself and demanding we dance to its digestion, and spraying cheap vodka in the face of anyone suggesting a solution. They’ve weaponized idiocy, channeled digital derangement into coherent form, built a persona that mocks the very idea of personas. Through grotesque caricature and well-calculated slob swagger, they play at an accidental stumble onto uncomfortable truths about consumerism and performativity. What makes
viagr aboys feel like a culmination of their work, and so very, very of its age, is that oh-so-calculated anti-image now feels like that funhouse mirror image of the world around it, and that (whether it’s true or not) ridicule and absurdity may often feel like the most potent weapons against it. The chaos may still reign, but the structure behind it has never been clearer.
