The first two albums were pretty tentative and still looking for a sound - Total Sex is a stinker in my view.
A favourite early one is Dedicated To Peter Kurten, I love the punchy way it was three-minute 'songs' as if it was a punk album. Yet highbrow little details like the Robert Ashley sample on Ripper Territory. Still sounds brutal thirty years in.
The early 90s was a pretty bad time for Whitehouse, it was a part-time concern doing very occasional shows with no fixed lineup and Twice Is Not Enough and Never Forget Death both sound half-assed and way too gentle on the ears compared with earlier and later work.
Quality Time from the mid-90s is a phenomenal record with some plain bizarre sounds and vocalising and some depth in the lyrics being added with the Sotos input.
Of the later records I really really like Asceticists 2006. Philip Best's lyrics on that, Racket and his last CE album are very clever, personal, obsessional and well-delivered. The review by Steve Underwood in ALAP of Crowd Pleaser really hit the nail for me talking about how so many in power electronics claim to have 'personal obsessions' which are exactly the same as all the other people in the scene: serial killers. S&M etc etc - so corny! The late era Whitehouse subject matter did try to escape the conservatism of a scene they inadvertently helped spawn, and when you figure some of it out it's as 'dark' as you could wish for also.
So much about the band that is utterly ridiculous of course. I get the feeling that a lot of the humour in the band hasn't translated too well outside the UK over the years. Even the supposedly heavy live shows as a three-piece before Sotos left were just really camp and silly beerfights with grown men behaving like kids in a sandpit and you'd see more real violence in any 'normal' nightclub on a Saturday night.
I think it's an amazing body of work, I know many people here didn't enjoy Cut Hands (I thought it was OK, pretty low-key) but as far as I'm concerned William Bennett could go on to do Sting covers if he wanted and still have my respect.