Track Listing

1. Blinded
2. Personality
3. Users
4. Fiction
5. Morning Rise
6. Twinkle
7. When We Were Young
8. Tripped
9. Honeymoon Is Over
10. We Don't Need Nobody Else

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5640 in Music
• Released on: 1995-08-10
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Brutal, unflinching brilliance
Mmm, I'd be willing to wager that Snow Patrol own a copy of this album. If you want to know where they nicked their powerful, keening guitar sounds on 'Final Straw', listen to 'Twinkle' 'Fiction' or 'Users' off this record. But where the Patrol err towards the soppy and sentimental in their lyrics, Whipping Boy write about weak men and feckless women, in thrall to their destructive urges.

Sex rears its ugly headboard im many of these songs, only occasionally as a healer, often as a destroyer. "No more songs for swinging lovers" as Fergal McKhee sings bitterly on 'Fiction'.

Regret and the passing of time is nailed ruthlessly in 'When We Were Young' - "When we were young nobody knew/ Who you were or what you do/ Nobody had a past that catches up on you."

'We Don't Need Nobody Else' caused controversy on its release as a single due to its first-person confessions of a wife-beater - "I hit you for the first time today/ I didn't mean it, it just happened/ You wouldn't let me go to the phone, you wanted to make love and I did not...."

Mckhee isn't afraid to set himself up as a despicable individual in many of these songs - "I have used so many people for no reason and no gain."

With its raw subject matter and strident, chiming guitars 'Heartworm' stood uneasily alongside the lairiness of Britpop. But now, 12 years later, it's wearing considerably better than a lot of music from that period.

Brutal and unflinching in its depictions of love gone wrong, 'Heartworm' wriggles its way into that most vital of organs and stays there.

Dark, brooding and powerful
I recently rediscovered this and had forgotten just how damn perfect this record is. It is very dark, but the darkness comes across in different ways. "We don't need nobody else" is intense and angry, sending shivers down the spine when the chorus cuts in, whereas the beautiful "Personality" is drunk and self-pitying and almost reminds me of Leonard Cohen or Jacques Brel.

There isn't one bad track on this album and it is a tragedy that Whipping Boy didn't get the success they deserve. Buy it and listen to it loudly on your own - you won't regret it.

Brilliance!
What a superb album this is, tender and cruel, lost and lonely, bitter and heartfelt. Another great rock album lost in the mid nineties dance maelstrom. Buy it and you wont regret it, it's superb!