It does in fact work to clean all the junk out of the deepest grooves in the vinyl. There is expensive crap you can buy to do this, but it's really not much better.

I've had a lot of luck lowering the surface noise and improving popping and whatnot by wetting the record before playing. I would do this when I ripped the vinyl, and it helped the subsequent processing into a CD greatly.

For anyone thinking of trying wood glue cleaning, I've been warned against doing it on 78s. I'm guessing the glue may bond whatever those were made of.

polyphonic paste