Home Schooled

Bacon Shoe, Back from Stinktion (self-released): No one writes lyrics like Lethal D. That's probably because no one is fucked in the head quite the way he is. He makes dirty rappers such as Soulfly and Kool Keith — even at their most profane — sound like normal guys who just happen to have the knack for waxing blue. D, on the other hand, spouts couplets such as I rub my balls on appliances/Got 'em chopped off in a rough game of Simon Says ("A New Discovery Shed"). Not all of them are dirty so much as really fucking weird. We dare you to guess at the inspiration behind this lyric: I clean a dead bird off of my pant leg/A dirty worm, she was drippin' from my lampshade/Get naked, and we motherfuckin' get paid ("Humphrey Squidteeth"). Or how about the obtusely disapproving verse Oh, no, you brought a big toe to the small toe show/That's the wrong way to make a friend, don'tcha know/I guess you don't, 'cause you been thinking so slow/Like, real slow. The small toe show? Bacon Shoe's first proper release, Back From Stinktion, is a sprawling garden of perverse impressionism and harsh, blarty, diarrhea-inducing beats. That's a good thing, because even after the group's clever antics wear thin in 20 years, the production work on Stinktion — as spooky, bare and weirdly soulful as an abandoned power plant at night — should keep heads bobbing well into the planet's lard-besotted future. Download: "A New Discovery Shed"

The Pedaljets, The Pedaljets (OxBlood): It was back in 1990 when the Pedaljets first attempted to record this, its second collection of songs. Things apparently did not go well. "The record blew," Matt Kesler told The Pitch earlier this year (see Buckle Bunny, March 29). That's hard to believe — could a studio rush job really have ruined songs this good? The fact that this rerecording of tunes nearly 20 years old sounds so good makes for a minor local-music miracle. Originally created at a time when college rock radio as typified by wildcats such as R.E.M. and the Replacements (to which the Jets have often been compared) was beginning to compete with proto-grunge for primacy in modern rock, The Pedaljets retains surprising musical integrity. Chalk it up to the right combination of sweet riffs, urban-slacker rage and country-boy swagger — all of which are given new life and refinement by older musicians with smarter ears and an insatiable desire to rock again. Any other albums out there you'd care to remake, Pedaljets? Download: "Place in the Race"