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Grunts & Farts
With "Man Stiff Pie," Cringe nods briefly to Missy Shitz; does she nod back or simply turn and walk away?

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By Simon Wetbutt-Nicholsthorpe

April 1, 2000 |  Cringe's freshman outing on My Zipper's Broke Records, "Man Stiff Pie," gave a nod to Crenelated Smegma's penultimate shout-out to electronica's dark darling of turntablism, Missy Shitz, in her sophomore outing on Used Wet Nap out of Berlin, whose junior prom was attended by former beatmaster Dougie Hauser, himself a veteran of the smegma wars from his hometown of Chapel Hill, N.C., where for years he has been a light fixture.

Leading off with a nod to shouting out to self-referential referencing of nods and shout-outs, the first cut is a veiled reference to Smegma's reprise of Crenelated Smegma's senior thesis on rug burn in the later works of Hans Derrida, a British plumber currently working as a handyman in the home studio of one veteran axman, Jorge Borhe of Wooly Booly, Australia.

Cringe "I throw up: the beat" My Zipper's Broke

It comes as no surprise, then, that the eponymous release could not be denied. While old-style beats borrow heavily on equity not quite fully amortized at today's favorable, if volatile, rates, the new rhythm sits pretty with a 10 percent share in Napster start-ups TapeMyWife.com and StealMySamples.com, and an on-board street-luge coach from the X Games as in-house terpsichorean.

The title track performs open-heart surgery on the smelly corpse of the old man of 'lectronica, while throwing out his desiccated spleen, liver and lungs (or perhaps as some in the less reputable press have reported, selling what it can and eating the rest!), instead relying on sampled soul beats and kidney pie. Segueing like a wounded wildebeest into the stately urban funereal tone poem with a ska beat "My Sister Can't Blow Me," the bone-tickling ditty sidesteps traditional ska-talogical conventions in favor of a wide-open, full-throttle bondage-and-discipline club beat reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau thrashing in the brambles for a dose of PCP he has misplaced while composing quatrains on Walden Pond.

Meanwhile, the true believers of the Cringe cognoscenti throw knowing nods to fascism and early Alpha Alpha Tai drinking songs. One cannot help but wonder, when Missy Shitz pants and moans, whose trailblazing beat she followed down that road of turntablist melancholy without consciously referencing Morrissey, as they say. Still, when a good Shitz comes you know it, as on the penultimate electronica-meets-"Stomp" raveup, "Can't Go My Pants Are Tight," a none-too-subtle gesture in the face of the growing subculture of listeners who openly prefer today's moody Shitz to the constrained, sharp-tongued Shitz of an earlier era.

Meanwhile, the four horsemen of Derrida's pug-nosed affability beat the bloody crap out of him with spanners stolen from his own toolbox. (MIA since a little-reported incident involving Paul McCartney's new low-flush unit and a six-pack of imported Porta-Potties sampled at 44.4 kilohertz.) Nevertheless, if you can't dance to it, you can always screw, as they say down in the East End.

Not so on the West End, where "screwing" takes on the sinister shroud of earlier releases from My Zipper's Broke "Fat Jeans Rooming House" by Gender Rind, Petroleum Mincemeat's "That's Offal Nice" and the perennial Peoria powerhouse's penultimate senior homecoming outing, "My Jock Strap Slipped."

April Fools' Day cover Salon's regular issue

(One can't help wondering what bandmates Down Pillow, Smoky Room and Warm Onion Pitts might think of Missy's about-face turn 90 degrees south of Wales on Shrimpton Road east of Hampton [there's a good place for bangers there if you can find it]. [After all, she hasn't been there for some time and can't have memorized the menu.])

Nevertheless, there's nothing that can't be denied here. But neither is this penultimate eponymous sophomore outing the shout-out to regional next-gen dancefloor melancholia that turntablist cognoscenti of the manifesto have been warming their Blaupunkts for since Boxing Day.

Or is it?

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