Mighty Mouths

** 1/2

GUTTERMOUTH

“Musical Monkey,” Nitro Records

Fans of dirty, puerile, mucous-dripping punk rock humor can breathe a sigh of relief, if their snotty noses permit it. The maturity that crept in through the wisecracks on Guttermouth’s 1996 album, “Teri Yakimoto,” has been terminated, freeing O.C.’s crudest bunch of musical jesters to play the fool, undistracted by any glimmer of serious intent.

As usual, “Musical Monkey” finds the band flinging verbal clods of obscene derision with the blithe carelessness of a tot playing in a mudhole. And, as usual, singer Mark Adkins and his comrades get away with it because their ridicule of gays, animal-rights zealots, punk rock factionalists and sundry other targets is so over-the-top and scattershot that it obviously is just a prank against social rectitude, an emission not of seething malice but of junior-high-level perversity. This approach robs Guttermouth of any real satiric bite (which would require moral outrage to buttress the foolery), but the band’s raunchy humor in the service of knuckleheadedness does bring some guilty titters.

Adkins inoculates himself against charges of hatefulness by targeting his own mama for his crudest and most demeaning sexual jokes. Anyone who would humiliate dear old mom for laughs, as Adkins does in the unspeakable “Lucky the Donkey,” claims a license to exploit anybody for laughs. And Guttermouth offers a kind of equal time, whooping it up with the rawest of gay stereotypes on “Big Pink Dress,” then mocking a character’s knee-jerk homophobic sputterings in “Do the Hustle.”

The highlight this time is a pop-cultural spoof that lays off the raunch in favor of innocent fancy. “What If?” has fun with an imaginary scenario in which Fred Schneider of the B-52s tries out for the Doors, giving Guttermouth an excuse to splice “Private Idaho” onto “Hello, I Love You.”

Along with its kid-ready recasting of the Mad magazine ethos in a raunchy punk milieu, Guttermouth owes its four-album career, steady touring and substantial grass-roots following to solid musical skills. The instrumental team--drummer Jamie Nunn, bassist Steve Rapp and guitarists Derek Davis and Scott Sheldon--does a good job of re-creating an Adolescents-style massed-guitar surge, and their forays into metal spoofery and neutered, KROQ-issue punk-pop allow for musical jokes at least as good as the crude verbal ones on which Guttermouth happily rests its scandalous reputation.

*

Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.