With their latest single, Parokya ni Edgar has proven that they can write a song that is stabbingly infectious and hardly to be forgotten in the near future. I like to point out that a compulsive john can also use those same words to aptly describe a bout with gonorrhea.

The band has always delicately walked the fine line between stupid and clever, and it's sometimes difficult to completely make out the intentions behind their songs. Being known pranksters, I sometimes find myself asking if I am merely not getting the joke or if I am already being an unwitting victim. The first two albums were essentially comedy sketches presented through well written pop songs. The Christmas album was standard PnE fare. The 'third' album was brilliant and the fourth was hardly necessary. The last one was interesting though, as the band somehow distilled their musical philosophy into a fitting package, in effect plying into the homage-mockery genre pioneered by Spinal Tap. Like this fictitious band, PnE has often left many wondering about the certainty of some of their undertakings. It helps the band get away with a few things, like the otherwise criminal Mr. Suave, which they can easily write off as an homage-mockery to the OPM plied by Rico J. Puno and his contemporaries.

Their new song, which you've definitely heard by now unless you're deaf, is meant to be a commercial jingle for a deodorant. It's as irritating as a perennial jock itch, and I'm left asking the question if PnE purposely made it that way as some kind of statement on commercialistic crassness, effectively taking the route that the late Andy Kaufman would take (that is, going out of one's way to be annoying, and in that sense, becoming doubly annoying). The video is actually worse, but I won't get into that anymore.

I actually hold a certain respect for the band, and I have to confess to owning their albums (on cassettes) because I always wondered what they were going to do next. I will still probably get their next album when it gets released but I'm really hoping that the deodorant song gets excluded. It is not even funk in the musical sense. I guess they were intending for a double-entendre... that is fine by me because I can always smell something funny whenever I hear the song, and I know that it's not because someome has an arm raised in my immediate area.

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