Being a “comedy” band is a lot more difficult than it initially seems. As stupid as The Bloodhound Gang seem, there’s a fine balance that has to be addressed between gross-out humour, borderline offensiveness and quirkiness that they’ve undoubtedly mastered. Guttermouth, on the other hand, seem a bit less sure of themselves – on new EP ‘Got It Made’, the extent of their incredibly broad strokes seem to gravitate towards poor sex jokes and frontman Mark Adkins’ obnoxiousness.

We’ll give them this, they’re at least merciful – they tend to keep their songs around two and a half minutes so it’s over pretty quickly, and in terms of skate-punk instrumentation they’re pretty much passable. But that’s more or less it, as ‘Got It Made’ just feels in poor taste from start to finish. Opener ‘The Point’ is perhaps the safest song here in that it’s more asinine than anything else, but then there’s ‘Old Man’, which features the line “Your wife is an inbred”. Lovely.

But while that’s bad enough on its own, the whole thing is amplified by a blanket of stupidity that’s completely unavoidable, as on ‘Freckles The Pony’. It leaves a horrible concoction of immaturity and mean-spiritedness everywhere – at least when Blink-182 used to go on about fucking dogs in the ass, they at least showed some songwriting chops elsewhere; Guttermouth don’t even have that.

That’s really what sends this EP plummeting down. Apart from some solid instrumentation, there’s nothing that Guttermouth really do to redeem the utter banality of their lyrical content, and the whole EP just feels unlistenably stupid. But saying that, this is a band who have a song about B-52’s frontman Fred Schneider auditioning to join The Doors, so what do you really expect?

2/5

‘Got It Made’ by Guttermouth is released on July 15th on Rude Records.

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Words by Luke Nuttall (@nuttall_luke)