<< Back To Press The BigTakeover: Whipping Boy (Third Album), May 2000 Posthumous albums are bittersweet. After a decade, Dublin’s finest band called it a day in 1999, a year after recording this third LP. That’s as strong an indictment of the British rock industry in the last five years as anything. 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 (they weren’t given support to tour the U.S., but you can hear it on their live b-sides), Whipping Boy were unable to secure a new deal and capitulated. Damn it. For Whipping Boy proves that every label in London and New York should have been waving fat contracts at them. It 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-dreampop tension, a mix of Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, and 1992 R.E.M. They’re gentle and lulling (especially where those strings barge in so forcefully, as on the fabulous "Fly"), then distorted, bruising, and lascivious in turns. FEARGHAL McKEE is the thick-voiced singer everyone should have, equal measures sinister, sardonic, soothing, sympathetic and sexy. His lyrics remain the groups’ extra ace in the hole, little observations on other people’s lives so succinct and colorful, they’re like mini-movies. The standout is "Pat the Almighty," a loving portrait of a typical young, charismatic Dubliner with indie tastes, with his "rake of rare guitars hanging on the wall" and who taps when he thinks. "The kid’s a fucking star/He should be wearing gold lamé/He should learn to move and sway/If he only stayed in tune/We’d all be on our way," sings McKee, as PAUL PAGE’s guitars surge behind him with roaring feedback. It’s just one of the memorable stanzas on an LP full of them. Best of all, every song is great. The pretty-pop prizes such as the opening, sweet "So Much for Love" (ah, those huge-sounding violins, violas and cellos!), "Who Am I?" (this time piano and country slide guitar), and "Ghost of Elvis" (light acoustic strumming, rim shots, quiet strings, and piano trills) 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, which makes it even more bittersweet. It makes you pissed off that the band is kaput, when they had so much more to offer. With such a fine parting gesture as this, it makes you wonder what music these folks will be up to in the future, separately. Final note: Unfortunately, this CD is going to prove a bitch to find. Released on their own label, it is at least available through guitarist Page. To date, he has been reliable in selling them to those who contact him. Jack Rabid