The Whigs

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The Whigs -- a fiery, young and timelessly tuneful rock trio from Athens, Georgia -- may well be the best unsigned band in America. They're definitely one of the hardest-traveling: To play for a packed crowd on New York's Lower East Side in March, the three guys drove an insane fourteen hours from Athens -- and then headed right back after the show. "It's like a mission," shrugs Parker Gispert, the band's lanky twenty-three-year-old frontman, whose onstage look alternates between T-shirt-and-ripped-jeans and hoodie-and-ripped-jeans.

SOUND After two years as local live faves, the Whigs recorded their debut, Give 'Em All a Big Fat Lip, last summer in an empty borrowed frat house -- air conditioning not included. The result spikes Nineties indie rock with Sixties pop craftsmanship and Southern-rock twang; Gispert's hoarse vocals and ragged-glory rhythm guitar tap into a Cobain-Westerberg vein, but when he and bassist Hank Sullivant switch to keyboards, they evoke Pet Sounds. Throughout, drummer Julian Dorio's precise, song-enhancing parts show off his early study of Mitch Mitchell and Ringo Starr. But Gispert, who started a Modest Mouse fan site as a teen, came late to the old stuff. "I'd never really heard any Beatles or Kinks or any classic stuff besides Bob Dylan until I got to college, so that all came at once," he says.

SCHOOL DAYS Gispert and Sullivant have one chore to take care of before they can hit the road for good: finishing their last semester of college. "I just got out of a computer-science lab," says Sullivant. "It was terrible."

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