Heartworm (2/33)

Heartworm by Whipping Boy
1995

Standout tracks: We Don't Need Nobody Else, Users, When We Were Young

Suffering sells. The idea of the 'tortured artist' has been romanticised to the point where Robbie Williams is crying in documentaries, a spell in rehab has become a mandatory requirement for anyone in the public eye and every X-Factor applicant has a tragic back-story just waiting to be sprayed out through quivering lips right infront of the camera. Is this some kind of ploy to justify their unearned wealth and fame or is it simply attention-seeking arrogance?
Unlike the readers of Heat, I find this easy to ignore. The only problem I have with it is that it taints the genuine.

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. Now I know the distance between us.
Christ, we weren't even fighting I was just annoyed!
Silence and you started to cry.
"That really hurt!" you said.
Yeah? And you thought you knew me!

Listening to this album can feel like reading a diary. Fearghal McKee echoes Stuart Staples and Nick Cave in his low-pitch story-telling lyrical delivery, littering his songs with uncensored excerts from some unpleasant journal, all of which are rumoured to be true. It never feels forced or added for shock-value, nor is it ever uncomfortable.
The pinnacle of these confessional tales comes, fittingly, with the album's hidden track, 'A Natural'. Starting with the line "Today is not a good day for me, for today I found I was mad!" McKee talks his way through being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and his own self-analysis around it. It's glamourless, fascinating and amazing.

Musically, the album is intelligently assembled. Whether it's the walls of guitar noise or the unintrusive orchestration, it all fits. Nothing is out of place, nothing added that shouldn't be, nothing missing. The urgency towards the end of 'Users', for example, builds with a menacing pace that threatens to engulf McKee's rantings before slipping away into fading feedback. The riff from 'When We Were Young', the choppy strings at the end of 'Personality', it's all gold.

Everyone I know who has heard this album loves it, but it's a hidden gem. As drownedinsound.com said: "This album was easily overlooked in the 1995 post-Britpop Blur-Manics-Oasis-moronathon. The shame is, that this album beats all three of those hands down."