The Whip / Wired Together

The Whip
Wired Together
(Southern Fried)
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Read any interview with The Whip and you’ll see that their main goal for this album was to “make music you can beef to”; to produce the sort of tracks that get you fired up and bouncing around, whether it’s at one of their gigs or in the comfort of your living room.

The pursuit of the perfect ‘beef music’ partially explains the wait for ‘Wired Together’. Unhappy with the initial recordings, the band shook their creative etch-a-sketch and headed back to the studio to start fresh – a bold move, but one that certainly paid off. Under the tutelage of production wizard, Jagz Kooner, the Manchester three-piece has come up with one of the most enjoyable electronic albums of 2011.

Where their debut contained an uneasy mix of opposing sounds (four-to-the-floor electronic stompers constantly battling with predominantly guitar-based tracks), ‘Wired Together’ parks itself firmly in the electronic lane, puts its foot on the gas and aims for the horizon.

It’s all the better for it, too. The opening trio of ‘Keep or Delete’, ‘Secret Weapon’ and ‘Shake’ are all strong enough to be future singles, effortlessly upping the tempo and setting the stall for more brutal, mid-album numbers like ‘Riot’.

The unquestionable highlight of the album, however, is the immense ‘Metal Law’ – an absolute beast of a track with a filthy drop and a refrain (“Get up. Go to work. Do the gig. Go to bed”) that could quickly become the anthem for frustrated workers everywhere.

‘Wired Together’ took three years to reach us, but make no mistake: it was a search for perfection that’s been worth the wait; this is electronic sweat music at its brilliant, bassy best.