Whipping Boy. Heartworn. Sony. You will thank me.", read the email. Presumptuous, but Roch had been right before, and it was a slow week for new albums. I hesitated for a moment, in the store, when I realized that the title was actually Heartworm, not Heartworn, but it hardly seemed fair to deprive a struggling band of an album sale because of a typo that they didn't even make. So I bought it. And an hour later I sent the thank-you.

Every once in a while, just to test myself, I try to recreate my ten-album desert-island-disc list without reference to any source material. The first seven entries are easy: one album each from my five favorite artists (Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes, Big Country's Steeltown, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Game Theory's Lolita Nation and Marillion's Misplaced Childhood), and my two invariant alsos, Del Amitri's Waking Hours and Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden. After those, though, I inevitably find that I come up with at least five entries for the last three slots, and I can never remember by what criteria I was able to differentiate among them on previous occasions. Jane Siberry's The Speckless Sky, The Icicle Works' If You Want to Defeat Your Enemy Sing His Song, New Model Army's Thunder and Consolation, Pop Art's Snap Crackle Pop Art and Runrig's Amazing Things are the other five I came up with when I tried this exercise yesterday, and indeed, when I check, I see that the last version I committed to paper, in mid-1994, concludes with the first three of these.

In most of these cases, the bands in question have also gone on to make other albums that I like nearly as much (including Game Theory reconfigured as The Loud Family, Pop Art reborn as Smart Brown Handbag, and Icicle Works leader Ian McNabb as a solo artist). The conspicuous exception to this rule is New Model Army, whose post Thunder and Consolation output includes two studio albums (Impurity and The Love of Hopeless Causes) that seem uneven and more than a little weary and played-out to me, a live album (Raw Melody Men) that for me fails to capture the energy of the band's concerts, and a really-only-for-fans b-sides collection. The inspired combination of agit-punk intensity, violin and atmospheric keyboards that I love about Thunder and Consolation never quite came together the same way again, whether because the band wasn't interested or wasn't able I know not. Until, that is, now. The spirit of Thunder and Consolation, dissatisfied with its hosts or perhaps just restless, appears to have jumped bodies and taken up residence inside the new Irish quartet Whipping Boy, from which footing it is able to meddle with striking effect in their US debut, Heartworm.

I should qualify what I mean by this. Whipping Boy don't sound like New Model Army in any individual aspect. Myles McDonnell and Colm Hassett's rhythm section doesn't come anywhere near emulating NMA's frenetic bass lines and vicious drumming, Paul Page's guitars don't have the punk edge of Justin Sullivan's, and singer Fearghal McKee's gentle Irish oration is a long way from the insurgent fervor with which Sullivan once screamed about Christian militias, the Falklands, American reverse-imperialism or the imminent destruction of the civilized world by the international technochemical conspiracy. What they do sound like, to me, is an extrapolation of the aura of Thunder and Consolation in a contemporary direction that NMA themselves didn't take it. By Impurity NMA seemed to me to have written themselves an ending, and on The Love of Hopeless Causes they were left with nowhere to go, and responded essentially by collapsing into old ways. Whipping Boy, unburdened by NMA's history, nor, frankly, by any even faintly evident social or political concern, which were always primary factors in NMA's persona and music, are thus free to explore the purely musical implications of Thunder and Consolation's expanded palette. Where NMA played at a hyperactive cant that made the early Clash sound a bit like the Eagles, Whipping Boy are children of their decade's aesthetic of busy drums, dense processing, big hooks, guitars mortar-and-pestled into a My Bloody Valentine-esque wash of overdrive, synthesized pizzicato strings and a trace of Manchester groove. Where NMA superimposed stark menace on rich atmosphere, Whipping Boy weave menace into the atmosphere itself. Where NMA ventured tentatively into balladry like a foreign world from which they might at any moment be extracted by a petulant transporter-room attendant (an intriguing tension, mind you), Whipping Boy aren't afraid of slow songs that sound like a well-massaged Liam Neeson rehearsing diary entries and love poems over the swirls of reflected firelight in a thick single-malt. And where NMA tore into the external world like piranhas attempting (and expecting) to dismantle a continental shelf, Whipping Boy are introspective to such a degree that outside realities creep into their songs only through the half-shuttered window of television name-bites.

Heartworm opens with a legato violin, which steps aside to reveal the elegant, trebly aural silhouette of "Twinkle", a song that seems disarmingly pleasant until the chorus introduces thundering drum cascades and guitars idling near the distortion red line, and the violin returns in a mode we could call "sawing" without much fear of contradiction. Listening to the lyrics undermines the impish title further, as the song turns out to be a wildly self-loathing unrequited vow of allegiance to a whore (though "unrequited", in this context, takes on a rather different meaning). The self-awareness with which McKee sincerely intones "She's the only one for me, now and always", in between itemizations of the girl's horrific faults, does for romance about what Mark Eitzel's songs do for drinking.

You'd think something more cheerful could be done with nostalgia, in the oscillating UK single "When We Were Young", but the childhood upon which recollection is cast turns out to have been spent, if the narrator is to be taken literally, primarily in petty crime and low-grade drinking, which somehow here don't have quite the harmless charm of the Gin Blossoms leading starchy Arizona cops on a good-natured Friday-night chase in "Hey, Jealousy". That the emblem of redemption in this memory should be an adolescent fondness for Starsky and Hutch is either a calculated retro-Americanism, or a depressing failure of the narrator to have even connected with his own time and country while growing up in it.

"Tripped" is about something else depressing, but neither its subject matter nor its quiet parts are any match for the witheringly metallic guitar noises that burst in at around the two-and-a-half-minute mark, which sound like the results of an ill-advised experiment by some renegade Korg and Yamaha modeling-synth techs to simulate an instrument merging the acoustic characteristics of a harpsichord and a lawn mower. "The Honeymoon Is Over" is kind of muted, too, until the terminal crescendo's cries of "So you remember now what it takes to make a woman cry?". And "We Don't Need Nobody Else" starts off calmly, too, with some dawn self-analysis laced with an oddly unprovoked remark about Bono (another NMA connection for me, as I persist in reading Bono into their anti-deserter anthem "Green and Grey").

But then, just before the chorus kicks in for the first time, things take a sinister turn from which, for me, the album never recovers. In the midst of some relatively innocuous philosophical musing, scorn suddenly wells into McKee's voice, and he says, threateningly, "And around here nobody tells me what to do anymore". Guitars roar in and lift up his defiant repetition of the title, but I can't yet tell what he means by it. And then the second verse unfolds a scene of domestic abuse perhaps most horrific because of its banality, and in the space of a few phrases "We don't need nobody else" has turned from independence and nationalism to a sort of Gaslight-esque psychological imprisonment, except this time the claustrophobic torture is bi-directional. I doubt that Whipping Boy accounted consciously for my NMA juxtapositions when they were writing this, but in the context of NMA's social broadsides, this chorus seems to me to point out that it's quite possible for two people to create so much misery in the confines of their own kitchen that it is hardly necessary to look outside any windows to find bile-eliciting inspiration. And perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this song is how, even after I've uncovered these significances, I am drawn magnetically to it. I keep playing it, over and over again, improvising harmonies over McKee's deadpan delivery. I don't espouse the sentiments, but then, neither does he. This is a character piece, common in other forms but rarely attempted in rock music because of notoriously literal-minded audiences (and their even more literal-minded parents). I sing along not because I identify with the narrator's character, but because I recognize humanity in the intricacy and depth of his portrait.

After that the rest of the songs exist in "We Don't Need Nobody Else"'s shadow. "Blinded" sounds a little like the Chameleons covering something by Ned's Atomic Dustbin. The languid "Personality", with its undisguisedly shallow admission of wanting to marry "someone who looks just like Koo Stark", undulates on soundtrack string swells. "Users" sounds like a variation on "Twinkle". "Fiction" seems to me like it would be an Echo and the Bunnymen record if somebody would just take their finger off the turntable and let it spin at its native speed.

Things come back into focus for me on the last track. "Morning Rise", slow and hushed, revolves around the line "When our time comes, I will know", and between its lyrics and the frame of mind that "We Don't Need Nobody Else" put me in, even this apparent vote of confidence in destiny takes on evil stalker/voyeur overtones. And after a short pause, the bonus track (listed on the album cover, so why they couldn't give it a track index of its very own I'm not sure), "A Natural", fills in the last piece of the harrowing puzzle with a meandering instrumental that accompanies a spoken recitation of a series of dire-sounding mental instabilities and family dysfunctions, which ends with a torrent of pitch-bent guitar and the concluding phrase "Today is not a day for me -- / Today is not for me". After listening to this album, you will know never to ask the band why they chose their name. Actually, after listening to this album I think it's wise to stay as far away from the members of Whipping Boy as possible, as they seem unhappy and unstable in such an insidious way that it could easily be viral.

But if you could catch diseases from CDs, I'd be well and thoroughly dead by now, so I guess it's safe to listen to this album again. Or maybe, given how many exposures I've had in the last couple weeks, and how many I still plan, a mask would be wiser.