Album reviews: Passenger – Songs for the Drunk and Broken-Hearted, and Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz

Passenger (Mike Rosenberg) offers a breakup album with nothing new to say, while Viagra Boys are full of ideas on their new record

Passenger (Press image)

Passenger – Songs for the Drunk and Broken-Hearted

★★☆☆☆

The breakup album is about as original as florals in spring, and yet musicians have been plumbing those depths for as long as art has existed. Breakups (especially ones timed to a pandemic) are by definition awful, and this time-honoured subject matter is what Passenger (Brighton's Mike Rosenberg) explores on his 12th studio album, Songs for the Drunk and Broken Hearted. Alas, it adds nothing new to the overladen canon.

Opting to channel his experience through a series of downtrodden, barfly characters instead of tackling it directly, Rosenberg, best known for the ubiquitous “Let Her Go”, is at a loss for new ways to describe a dissolved partnership. Piano-tipped opener “Sword from the Stone”, a pleasantly melodic closure-seeking note inquiring how his former love's been (“Hope you're eating well, hope you're staying strong”), can only manage to sum up his feelings with primary school platitudes like, “I'm up and down like a yo-yo.”

Later, on melancholy ballad “Suzanne”, Rosenberg observes an older woman sitting alone reflecting on days gone by. Didn't Leonardo DiCaprio illustrate that scene 24 years ago while wooing Kate Winslet in Titanic? On the twanging, paint-by-numbers ditty “Remember to Forget”, Rosenberg digs into the perspective of another dive-bar character, this time a man who’s knocking them back and needs to call it a night. We all know that guy – the one who overstays his welcome at the bar because he just doesn’t want to be alone. It’s a shame: Rosenberg wants to illustrate empathy by demonstrating his characters’ universal relatability, but each archetype just comes off as overly simplistic and two-dimensional.

While Rosenberg rolls out affable, reedy-voiced melodies that are about as harmless as an Edward Sharpe song soundtracking a supermarket visit, it’s unfortunate that he can’t find something new to say about one of the most prevalent circumstances a human can experience. Instead of addressing his current situation head-on, Rosenberg instead opts to hide behind hollow caricatures. For an album so interested in being at the bottom of a bottle, Songs for the Drunk and Broken-Hearted could stand to go a lot deeper.  RB

Viagra Boys – Welfare Jazz

★★★★☆ 

Everything about Viagra Boys seems designed not to be taken seriously. Let’s start with their name, which their publicists have to star out to stop emails landing squarely in the “spam” folder. Their debut album, 2018’s Street Worms, was full of outlandish statements – frontman Sebastian Murphy’s howls of “I’m not like those other boys”. But for all the Stockholm post-punks' claims to be against "serious music", their music manages to be fun as well as pertinent to current events.

The title of their new album, Welfare Jazz, is itself a swipe at the Swedish government’s institutionalised arts classism. Before, they emulated the voices of the people they most despised – the rich, the privileged, the ignorant – now they also speak for the dispossessed. “Creatures” subverts elitist attitudes towards “the people at the bottom” on a bed of murky Joy Division synths, while “Girls & Boys” is a feverish, sometimes incoherent gasp of youthful angst.  

There’s a fantastic sense of space on this record. The cluttered instrumentation on “Toad” is preceded by “Cold Play” and its lone sax in an empty room; the growling riff on “Shooter” gets right up in your face. It helps that the band have such a wild sense of musical abandon – “we want panpipes on ‘Into the Sun’, so we’re having panpipes”, they seem to say. There’s a lot to unpack, but Welfare Jazz is a smart and rousing listen. ROC