The Peculiar Body of Viagra Boy’s Welfare Jazz
It’s an album that stretches your ears wide open and climbs in, crawls through your ear canal, sits in the shadow of your brain, and stays there for hours after the fact.
Viagra Boys’ (latest release) Welfare Jazz isn’t quite an album you dance to. No, it isn’t something you vibe to in the background, either. It’s an album that stretches your ears wide open and climbs in, crawls through your ear canal, sits in the shadow of your brain, and stays there for hours after the fact.
Welfare Jazz is as much jazz as The Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come is punk. The underlying foundations of the genre are there, but through the infiltration of several alien genres — such as poetry, country, and rock — Viagra Boy’s Welfare Jazz becomes a musical fever dream of different sounds and ideas.
The Swedish jazz-rock band, Viagra Boys, was originally formed in 2015. Welfare Jazz is their second album, and leans far harder into a jazz foundation than the band’s debut Street Worms. From the get-go, “Ain’t Nice” kicks the album open as a punk-jazz track that shifts its weight between electronical punk and classical jazz in a feud of instruments and vocals. Immediately after, the brief “Cold Play” plays out as a pure standard Jazz track.
The spontaneity of Welfare Jazz is like a chemical reaction. The album tends to explode in a new direction before straightening itself out along its jazz core. These changes are brief, sometimes isolated incidents, except for the sharp heel-twist the album makes in the final few tracks. This sonical twist is directly marked by the outro track, “In Spite of Ourselves,” a cover of country singer John Prine’s own track of the same name.
amyl and the sniffers vocalist amy taylor joins viagra boys on ‘in spite of ourselves’