Whipping Boy Whipping Boy

Whipping Boy Whipping Boy

Get It At Discogs

Posthumous albums are bittersweet. After a decade, Dublin's finest band called it a day in 1999, a year after recording this third LP. Dumped by Columbia despite rave reviews for 1995's phenomenal Heartworm, a Top 40 U.K. hit in "We Don't Need Nobody Else," and a reputation as a fearsome live group, Whipping Boy were unable to secure a new deal and capitulated. Damn it. Whipping Boy finds the quartet evolving exquisitely, adopting fresh touches such as washes of sonorous strings and sparkling piano, and composing some downright beautiful, tickling, ballad-tempo songs. And yet they remain all post-dream pop tension, a mix of Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, and 1992 R.E.M. They're gentle and lulling, then distorted, bruising, and lascivious in turns. Fearghal McKee is the thick-voiced singer everyone should hear, equal measures sinister, sardonic, soothing, sympathetic, and sexy. His lyrics are little observations on other people's lives so succinct and colorful, they're like mini-movies. Best of all, every song is great. The pretty-pop prizes such as the opening, sweet "So Much for Love," "Who Am I?," and "Ghost of Elvis" are so playful and amiable, you almost forget the thunderclaps of dense, stun-guitar anxiety elsewhere. And even the harsh stuff is offset by something lovely like "Pat the Almighty"'s background harpsichord plinking amongst the chaos. Likewise, the closing "No Place to Go" is a small epic of feeling, with beauty and the beast in one song. In the end, it's hard to find a flaw with this fantastic, meticulously put together record.

Whipping Boy Heartworm

Whipping Boy Heartworm

Get It At Discogs

As recently as 2013, Whipping Boy’s masterpiece, Heartworm, topped a poll of the best Irish albums of all time, conducted by Phantom FM, beating out competition from U2, Van Morrison and My Bloody Valentine. Heartworm’s status as Ireland’s Nevermind is still very much in tact. Arriving as it did it in the mid 90’s, Heartworm, fittingly, has a foot in both grunge and britpop: the tsunami of layered guitars, angst and aggression of the former mixed with the direct, instant and focused pop craft of the latter. Guitarist Paul Page and bassist Myles McDonnell built musical canvases that took the best from The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3 and Echo & The Bunnymen. Vocalist and lyricist Fearghal McKee wrote of an Ireland that seemed uncharted and uncovered, describing in terms befitting of an Irvine Welsh novel the seedy side of life in Dublin, crooning as he does in a Dublin accent. McKee’s lyrics, though dark and claustrophobic, have an inclusive strand that made fans feels part of a gang: ‘We Don’t Need Nobody Else’ became a raison d’etre for the band and fans alike, while ‘When We Were Young’ meant to The Pope’s Children what The Undertones’ ‘Teenage Kicks’ had meant to the generation before. If Heartworm is the sound of a band in transition, moving into the next dimension, it’s also the sound of a generation in transition between the early- 90’s hangover from the recession- stricken 80’s to the Celtic Tiger years, which really began in 1997, by which time the band had, sadly, imploded and run out of steam.