We Don't Need Nobody Else	Columbia
	1995
"Twinkle" is commanding Cure-pop. Full of sound and fury, though I'm not sure what it signifies. Track 2, 'A Natural' is worth a serious listen: very very harrowing, it starts off with Fergal intoning "Today I discovered I was mad...it has come to my attention that over the past year and a half I have acquired a condition known as acute paranoid schizophrenia" and gets darker and darker en route posing real questions like: "Is it possible to fall in love with every girl you meet?". Even in the middle of summer, this is heart rendering SAD, but hope, idealism and humanity are never far from the surface, best summed up in the lines like "Each person has his own tragedy", and despite the dark subject matter, the oboe backing is quite beautiful.

	We Don't Need Nobody Else	Columbia
	30 September 1995
Old Creation-'styled' guitars. Bloke blathering in monotone about "aversion" and "mountains maybe". Poetic cool which then knocks your block off with Joy Division's murderous guitars melds and erm, "whips" you back to the tip of the treacherous glacier. Odd, bleak, huge and just like The Chameleons (ask your great-grandmother). Whipping Boy come from Dublin but their souls are standing on the hem of the smoking jacket of Beelzebub which may exist in the same place for all we know.