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The Whip: X Marks Destination

02nd April 2008 | by Theo Ellington

Since the mid-nineties with the demise of Brit-pop, the Manchester music scene has been a very much enclosed self-obsessed area, musically speaking with only a select few artists breaking out to the wider audience of the UK.

If Manchester is to stride into the limelight once more in 2008 could The Whip be the guys driving the bandwagon?

Though first track "Trash" is a half decent effort in itself, the full impact of what The Whip really offer isn't felt until following track "Save My Soul", which is held in place by recurring synthy bell-like sounds and frantic percussion playing.

Many times The Whip fall into a land reminiscent of artists like LCD Soundsystem. "Frustration" is a perfect example of this with it's distinctly 80's synthesizers. The Whip do maintain their footsteps in the modern world though, with tracks such as "Throw It In The Fire" and "Divebomb" proving resolutely true to modern technology with well mixed bleeps and low grinding bass maintained in a rock-like expanse full of successions of ever more synthesizers resembling voices. Lots of pulsating distorted guitar-like sounds filling the background spaces serves to heighten this statement.

Though probably not intentionally so, "Dubsex" sounds very much akin to fellow Mancunians Nine black Alps, had they decided to go electro.

What steals the 8th point from The Whips final tally isn't expressly to do with there being any particularly bad tracks throughout "X Mark Destination", it's simply the fact that there isn't anything amongst the 10 tracks that really - as a complete set of work - jumps out of the overall picture and calls out: “HEY YOU! GET YOUR MIND OVER HERE AND FOCUS ON ME!” With no noticeable flagship moments, the end product does indeed come out a little flat. This likely could have maybe been corrected had the album been shortened in length, or if they had gone for a complete change in direction during the album. Although, with this being their debut, there's plenty of time to get everything right next time, with the exception of that, all is mostly solid and danceable here.