Review Summary: Get down with the crumpets
I’ve always admired the humble crumpet. The infamous breakfast morsel has, as I’m sure you’re aware, an impressively curvaceous (albeit sexless) exterior, fat-pancake-circa-dry-flan adjacent, oozing style and sophistication like no other morning butter-receptacle whilst tastefully masking its vacant innards. Take a bite. Experience the congealed-milk-meets-old-shoe-sole texture, spongy entrails clinging to the various gaps between tooth and gum in a disinterested, non-committal fashion. Apply jam, liberally. You now have a (shit) donut. Watch as your chosen spread diffuses into, through and out of the bottom of your budget bun down your jeans and into your shoes. Fingers simultaneously slippery and sticky, you are unable to clean said sludgy spillage w/o worsening, significantly, the state of your trousers.
“May I have another?”, you say to no-one (crumpet connoisseurs dine alone). Despite your sorry-soggied state, you do, in fact, have another. Such is the allure of the humble crumpet. Only the British could have conceived of a food item so quietly inept at performing the sole role for which it was created (to retain, rather than excrete, breakfast condiments), that yet remains so unbelievably tantalising as to render all other morning-to-early-afternoon snacks obsolete. As such, over 1,942 UK-based boulangeries, patisseries and other-places-that-make-things-that-are-not-crumpets have declared bankruptcy in the last few weeks or so, crumpled beneath the springy succulence and sheer value-for-money that is the Warburtons Crumpet 9-pack, available nationwide for just £1.00 at all good Sainsbury’s stores. By retort, competitor Waitrose has recently released a limited edition range of variously-seasoned, middle-to-upper-class crumpets (seeded, triple cheese, sourdough and gluten free, amongst others) which, whilst each objectively superior products to their orange/white-branded counterparts, retail at an astronomical £1.15 to £1.55 per measly 4-pack, up to 3.25x (ish) more expensive (per crumpet, or /PC) than the 9-piece household-staple, leading to concerns as to the future viability of Waitrose Limited as a business venture
omnes simul. This, our sources report, is likely the driving force behind the current controversial and only mildly racist ad-campaign against the plain vanilla (yet vanilla-less) crumpet, bankrolled in no small part by the 52,590 employees of the quite-posh supermarket chain whose collective future livelihood now hangs precariously in the balance. We reached out to the group company’s CEO for comment - a man suspected, for obvious reasons, as the
“key player” behind this anarchical movement, not least due to the fact that Mr Bames Jailey has appeared in no less than 5 of the 12 propaganda-esque television advertisements released to date by the militant ACA (the Anti Crumpet Association) in an ill-fitting homemade (seemingly) balaclava, engineered (it appears) from pastel blue (and decidedly not opaque) womens tights - who (the CEO) unsurprisingly declined to comment on the matter, instead offering, by means of consolation, an exuberant (I think I mean inordinate) discount on Waitrose’s new range of hole-less crumpets (which, to this music reviewer person, would simply appear to be breakfast muffins masquerading as crumpets for clout) if I agreed not to run this story (an offer which, my journalistic integrity unbesmirched, I declined, albeit later purchasing (at full price) a number of said pseudo-crumpets for personal use, jeans and shoes blissfully unmolested and jam-free courtesy of revolutionary hole-free technology). How high this thing goes, I can’t be certain. What I do know, however, is this: the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ new 2022 album
Night Gnomes is such an infallibly-down-the-line no-nonsense rather-quite-good-but-not-at-all-groundbreaking psych-rock record that there is absolutely nothing whatsoever of any substance or interest for me to say about it except that it exists and can be listened to if you wish. I digress…
