by Scott Yohe
It is no secret that doing satire in a way that won’t get people to roll their eyes at you is difficult. It is also no secret that getting comedy to translate well into your music so people still find it funny but also take you seriously is difficult. However, Viagra Boys have successfully done both on their newest full length album Cave World. After the success that was Welfare Jazz, the band has kept the ball rolling with their most thematically consistent and topically relevant album yet. Cave World is impossible to listen to and not have fun, it’s impossible to not bob your head along to the music and laugh at the lyrics, no matter how serious they are.
The album begins with the song “Baby Criminal,” and straight from the start we are introduced to the concept of the album. The song is about a mother realizing their child is turning into a bad kid, one that microwaves batteries and kills squirrels. As the song's protagonist, Jimmy grows up and continues to get worse, a teen that takes sleeping pills during the day and joins a gang. Vocalist Sebastian Murphy screams the chorus “He used to be a little baby and now he's just a criminal/Used to be a baby, now he's just a criminal” all the way to the end. The next song, “Cave Hole” is just a straight instrumental groove, pure post-punk greatness in every way. “Troglodyte” is all about how the people this album is making fun of, mostly online right-wingers wouldn’t say anything in public, would have been ostracized in prehistoric times because they couldn’t even evolve into monkeys. “Punk Rock Loser,” which I believe to be Viagra Boys best song yet, really kicks it up a notch. Instead of laughing at the online posters, it laughs at people who glamorize a punk rock lifestyle that they probably don’t lead and if they did it would be a pretty sad life. The song just oozes a false sense of swagger, the kind that people think they have but in reality don’t.
“Creepy Crawlers” is all about making fun of people that don’t believe in vaccines, people who have absurd beliefs that babies are being harvested for drugs, and that getting vaccines will cause you to grow animal hair or tails. The song is especially funny but equally worrisome because there are plenty of people out there that believe this type of thing. Several of the songs are about returning to a more primitive state, like “Return to Monke” (named after a specific internet meme) or “The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”. There’s even a Jason Williamson (of Sleaford Mods fame) feature on “Big Boy,” what other cosign does this album need?
While the lyrics of Cave World are funny and are satirizing a certain kind of people, it is important to not lose sight of the purpose behind doing that. A lot of people might find the lyrics too on the nose but it should be noted that there are people out there have these beliefs and would say some of these lyrics sincerely. In typical Viagra Boys fashion, all the instrumentals are consistent in their post-punk style. Every track has a consistent groove, there are fantastic solos all over the place, plenty of instrumental freakouts. You can see how good the music itself is on both instrumental songs. It is everything you could want a Viagra Boys album to sound like. The thing about Cave World is that it probably won’t convince anyone to change their beliefs, but it’s not trying to. What it does do is point out how absurd some of these things are. It does this perfectly and on top of that it lets the listener have a great time while it does this.