Whipping Boys eponymously titled third album is big. In both sound and ambition, this is a big, big record, an album where the songs not only grandstand but showboat as well. Which is not a bad thing. Kicking off with "So Much For Love", a neat meditation on the nature of reality as opposed to those versions of romance portrayed in your average love ballad, and continuing with "Bad Books", this is tumultuous, intense, affected and epic showmanship, all ascending strings and musical turmoil, all knowing sarcasmand discontented vocals.

"Fly" is dense, the vocals buried, hard to decipher, while the Joy Division inspired "That Was Then, This Is Now" is an abrupt slice of guitar rock which sees the band attempt to sonically lacerate their own work. Less successful is "One To Call My Own", despite featuring some excellent guitar work by Paul Page. "Pat The Almighty", "Puppets" and "Mutton" trade satirical sideswipes at pop culture poseurs and all those "ideal stars" who populate the cultural landscape. Direct and savage rather than genuinely insightful, few could deny their delicious wordplay or the latter's swift kiss-off line.

"Puppets" begins a quartet of songs which alone are enough to guarantee the reputation of Whipping Boy as one of Ireland's consistently entertaining bands. The standout track is "Who Am I?", a tale of uniformity, of genetic engineering gone mad, where we can manufacture the perfect offspring in the "emporium of seeds". This is a great song, lyrically and musically astute, a macabre comedy disturbingly close to reality. The muse surfaces in "The Ghost Of Elvis", as poppy as the album gets, a song about restless energy finding an outlet. It's "easy being here in Mono Land" sings Ferghal McKee and obviously not wanting to take the easy way out, Whipping Boy‚ ends with the biggest song of all. In glorious stereo. "No Place To Go" begins sluggishly and then builds. And builds. And builds some more, until, I swear, it tries to kick a hole in the universe.

Whipping Boy‚ is that rare of things: an ambitious, crammed album that avoids being bombastic. This is an album about masks and the self, an album about the modern world and about pop music itself. It is a great record from a band that are worth spending time with.

Deserves to be big.