“I can’t believe we’ve made it this far without getting deported.” That’s how Viagra Boys’ frontman Sebastian Murphy introduced his punishing takedown of the modern world, “Troglodyte,” from the band’s 2023 release Cave World.
Actually, he said one other thing before launching into the song, but I can’t repeat it here. Suffice to say, it was an alliterative suggestion of how his audience might want to treat the rising tide of fascism. And it rhymes with truck.
Viagra Boys, a cross-genre sextet hailing from Sweden, made a stop in Washington, DC’s Anthem for the second-to-last show of the current leg of their Infinite Anxiety Tour. Murphy admitted to being very tired but thanked the five thousand or so fans who packed the stately theater for helping revive his energy.
And energy is exactly what the band delivered, ripping through 19 songs in 100 minutes. The crowd danced and sang along to every one of them.
Viagra Boys defy description as modern primitives
I’ve heard a lot of people try to describe the type of music Viagra Boys play. In terms of genre, you can call it punk or hardcore, or industrial. There’s a taste of hardcore emo if such a thing exists. But I’m not sure any genre captures what Murphy and his mates are doing, especially on their latest and best album viagr aboys. So I’ve been working on it.
Viagra Boys are kind of like what you’d get if the Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes fronted Modest Mouse. There’s a melodicism hidden within the pounding rhythm lines, paired with a guttural messiness – or looseness, as Murphy describes it.
Or the Viagra Boys are the 13th Floor Elevators had they lasted longer than 15 minutes and experienced the punk revolution they helped create. That’s especially true on the fringes – in the spiraling soundscapes that come from either edge of the stage. Elias Jungqvist’s swirling synths and Oskar Carls’ sax and flute excursions color each song in an off-center, carnival-like glow.
But spiritually, Murphy may be most closely linked to a modern-day Ray Davies. “Return to Monke,” also from Cave World, may not sound much like the Kinks’ 1970 gem “Apeman,” but both songs encourage a return to a simpler time in man’s evolution. Evolution, it turns out, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Murphy actually references the year the Kinks released Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One in the song that kicked off VB’s show on Friday night, “Man Made of Meat.” It is the lead track off of the current album, and its chorus goes like this…
“I don’t want to pay for anything
Clothes and food and drugs for free
If it was 1970 I’d have a job in a factory
I am a man that’s made of meat
You’re on the internet looking at feet
I hate almost everything that I see
And I just want to disappear.”
While Murphy gallops about the stage – tattooed and shirtless like a somewhat less fit Iggy Pop – bass player Benke Hockert stands next to him, driving each song forward with a relentless volume of sound. The American-born Murphy, who has called Stockholm home since he was 17, was discovered by Hockert singing karaoke ten years ago.
Since then, they have released four albums and steadily climbed the ranks of (pick whatever genre you want) headliners. They combine that aggressive, nonstop rhythm that bounces between tidal wave and freight train, along with an offbeat sense of melody and Murphy’s downright weird sensibilities and sharp songwriting, to create a sound that borrows from many sources but stands on its own as original.
That songwriting has gotten stronger over the years. Though they threw in a couple of potent early numbers like the epic jam of “Research Chemicals" and the truly freaky instrumental “Cold Play,” which allowed Carls to run wild, about half of the set came from the latest album.
Murphy looks outward, as in the Sex-and-Candyish “Pyramid of Health”…
“So come on down
Bring your sacrificial goat and don’t forget to wear your feathers and your silly little necklace
Get real high with the shrimp up in the sky and you’ll no longer fear your death
The pyramid of health”
And he looks inward in “Uno II”…
“I seem like such a bitch when I talk about Swedish politics.”
Murphy never ceases to invent jarring imagery that works like beat poetry, evoking ideas without always making them on the nose. And Hockert and the band provide an overpowering base for those words.
Murphy stumbled over the beginning of “Down in the Basement,” the first track from their first full-length album. He stomped around the stage after several false starts while trying to get the lyrics right. Later, he seems to have lost his sunglasses because he went into the crowd and asked if anyone could lend him a new pair.
But that all fits with the “looseness” that VB preaches in songs like “Punk Rock Loser”…
“I ain’t your average, normal dude
It sure ain’t glamorous, I keep things loose”
The set closed with a powerhouse run from the positively sinewy “Medicine for Horse,” which saw Murphy actually swaying rather than stomping around the stage, through the ultra crowd-pleasing “Sports” – that epic sax-fueled jam of “Research Chemicals to the encore numbers “The Bog Body” and “Return to Monke.” Murphy closed with an exhortation to the crowd to keep being who you are because, as he sings in “Worms”…
“The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.”
Oddly enough, at a Viagra Boys concert, that’s actually a comforting thought.