Viagra Boys
Street Worms

THE REVIEW

There’s something rotten in Sweden.
It was already there back in twenty eighteen.

“Street Worms”, “vermi di strada”. The debut album of the Swedish band led by an American, Sebastian Murphy on vocals, a worrying ascites nurtured like a never-ending pregnancy (…); baby-faced Oskar Carls on sax and backing vocals, Henrik Höckert on bass, Tor Sjödén on drums, Martin Ehrencrona on keyboards, rest in peace Benjamin Vallé, the laughing satyr, founder of the group and promoter of the Swedish scene, god rest his soul, on guitar.

It all begins with the tale of a husband regretting having had lecherous relations with a goat, in a basement bathed in red lights, “Down in the Basement”.
He’s confiding in a friend who presses him with questions about the meaning of his act, and in the end he decides to murder the friend before returning to his wife, because nobody should know about his vice.
A bouncing bass-and-drum tour de force, funky guitar riffs, shouts and laughter from the Salic Law of the Scandinavian gringo Murphy, like a bawdy joke told to quickly down the first icebreaker drink and get warmed up.

“Slow Learner”, “ritardato”, the portrait of a slow-learning student who attended high school until he was twenty-two, but who still manages to learn a hundred words per hour.
Deep down, we’re still kids, and also slow learners.
A rising Superbowl jingle (a tribute to Murphy’s Californian roots), bluesy, noisy para-ska, frat party style “Animal House” with David Thomas, tipsy, leading the way.
Hands up for the Lord.
The second pint, done.

Let’s do a bit of “Sports” on the third track, to get healthier, just for a bit of “Lust for Life”: basketball, baseball, volleyball, “getting high in the Morning”, “ubriacarsi la mattina”, “buying things off the internet”, “comprare le cose di internet”.

The fourth commandment is the psycho-dance/punk gallop of “Shrimp Shack”, à la Franz Ferdinand in their heyday, with the emphatic keyboards of The Sound of Liberty, the swagger of the Stranglers, the Reedian tremors of guitar with the Blue Mask from Robert Quine. Down goes the third pint of stout and still not feeling it.

“Just like You”, “avrei potuto essere come te”, the fifth round gets a bit gloomy, it stumbles a bit, maybe things will go differently on the sixth, who knows.
It opens with a pastiche of the bass line from “Figurative Theatre” by Christian Death, with Tom Waits’s staggering vocals from Bone Machine, drinking elbow to elbow at the bar with Ian Dury, making out a little.
It’s the same register as the de facto couple Tom Waits & Ian Dury, but suddenly revived in mood by the sixth swig, with accusations of infamy and espionage against the Frogman, “Frogstrap”.

It’s not like we only listen to late albums by classic rock acts or ‘80s bands, while we raise our glasses for the seventh upstroke, with “Shrimp Shack” we can say we also listen to and love Black Keys and Idles.
This must be clear.
Prosit.

The masterpiece comes almost at the end, it swarms in the lead-up to the finale, “Worms”, “Vermi”, giving the lungs a moment’s rest six feet under, to reflect on everything staged so far.

There will be time to finish and have your heart stopped in a speechless, convoluted send-off, in the dub instrumentals, free jazz, stretched-out post-punk of “Amphetanarchy”.

But it’s not over yet, now is the time to sing the Worms.
Finds relief for the suppurating forced fun, in a drunken ballad at a vomit’s pace. And what if what’s stirring in the belly isn’t gastric juice but worms? The cadenced bass’s dry retching opens things up, awaiting the saxophone counterpoints after a verse and a half of restless sleep.
It’s definitely three in the morning of hepatic suffering.
Moans of hyperglycemia from intoxication.
Noisy interference, an unlikely encounter in the bathroom of the Anderes Ufer between the wasted crooning of Iggy Pop and a sad, slipper-wearing variant of the Swell Maps.
3:30, that’ll do.

Sebastian Murphy delivers yet another great performance of smiling, self-destructive vocals. Spoken words, chanting, reciting, finally screaming.

“They’re gonna eat you up,
gonna slither all around you,
touch you everywhere.”

Infected family candaulism, from the mouths of sung days, one two three. Just kidding a bit. Shall we dance?

“We got the same worms, baby”.

The combo would never be this artistically powerful again, not after a single great debut, replicating what was once cachectic and glorious on other records; never at the level of what was created in this squat tunnel built in a Stockholm apartment block garage, filled with empty 8.0 cheap beer cans.

The lopsided perimeter of a nine-sided catalog of failures.
A wheel of sharp corners, it doesn’t roll unless it smashes itself, tumbling from one ruinous leap to the next, into the next future.

“The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too.”