<< Back To Press Melody Maker: Submarine, June 1992 The name is the key. The name is what gives the band the edge,the chance to be special. With its implicit perversity, with those barbed master/slave tendrils hanging off,with the instant unease it produces in the recesses of the mind, the name is crucial. It hints at a power game that suddenly isn't a game anymore, at role playing that somewhere along the line becomes deadly serious.Yup, its definitely the name. Of course the music doesn't hurt. Or maybe it doesn't hurt as much as it should. But then no album could quite live up to that cognomen,so lets leave the name aside for now and have a look at the record in question. Starting with the titles, naturally, because associative words are sprinkled like little landmines throughout the tracklist. "Submarine","Snow", "Beatle","Valentine 69"-ah yes we're headed for blissed out noise with a melodic undertow and an edge of kinkiness. Nice to know where you stand. So now lets listen to the thing and find out that everything we surmised is both quite correct and thoroughly inadequate. Theres an atmosphere and an attitude here stretching way beyond limp copyism.Never mind that Lynchian chestnut about the dark,seething interior beneath the cute, clean surface.Whipping Boy's album tastes,appropriately enough of the weals and scars on the surface itself. While every other fucker has spent the last couple of years whitewashing their sound with anything they could lay their hands on, Whipping Boy have stripped it. You can see the brickwork again. Whipping Boy have taken those noisy old guitars and endowed them with a nervous system. Paul Page's intricate, serrated fretwork encases the album like a fine mesh net, shaping itself to the vagaries of Fearghal McKee's vocals.Here is a voice that is flat and not ashamed. The boy just cannot sing.Its this fearless inability that makes the most obvious takes on other bands The Stone Roses on "Astronaut Blues", the Velvets on "Bettyclean" just about everybody on "Safari" into moments that belong to Whipping Boy alone. It makes the whole affair deliberately, delicately, abstruse and effectively covers the bands tracks. Which isn't something I would recommend to anybody else. Stronger folk than you have been driven batty by lesser tasks than applying the logic of transcription to a Whipping Boy song. It would be easier to effect a skeleton transplant on a sardine. Point is, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Should you want a cat skinning, these are the lads for the job.Equipped with an array of both scalpels and hatchets, they will flay your feline before snoopy neighbours have the chance to reach the phone and call the RSPCA. You've heard it all before,inevitably you have heard everything all before if you've wanted to.The elements of rock music change infrequently and slowly. Choose to be blasé about "Submarine" and you will miss out on a subtle and oblique configuration of these elements. Whipping Boy could never stand accused of being bleeding obvious, bleeding, yes, obvious, no.Returning to the significance of names, the most apt summary of "Submarine" can be found on the label. Liquid. David Bennun