Album review: The Vaselines, Sex with an X

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 11:55

THE VASELINES: SEX WITH AN X **** SUB POP, £10.99

IF ANYONE knows anything about The Vaselines, they know that back in the early 1990s they were Kurt Cobain's fave rave. So there's really no point ignoring the elephant in the room. Were it not for Nirvana's ill-fated frontman taking such a proprietary interest in a lowly scuzz-punk pop band from Glasgow who were little known outside the contemporary DIY indie scene, this album might not exist at all.

Their relative obscurity was all part of the appeal. By the time Cobain had nailed his colours to the Vaselines' mast, Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee had gone their separate ways, splitting the band on the day their debut album was released, leaving a legacy which amounted to about an hour of lo-fi recorded material. In hindsight, cult status is made of such judicious timing but the truth was more prosaic. Kelly and McKee, mere kids when they formed their band in the mid-80s, were sick of playing the toilet circuit and not getting paid. Being in a band just wasn't irreverent fun anymore.

A couple of years later, Cobain was hailing the duo as his favourite songwriters, covering - and thereby immortalising - three of their songs, Molly's Lips, Son Of A Gun and Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam, and naming his daughter Frances Bean Cobain after McKee (allegedly, she says). At Cobain's behest, the Vaselines played one reunion gig with Nirvana in Edinburgh and Kelly made a guest appearance during Nirvana's headline slot at the 1992 Reading Festival. The Vaselines were dead; long live The Vaselines.

Kelly went on to front the grungey Captain America/Eugenius, then produced a couple of albums of country-inflected solo material, while McKee divided her energies between teaching yoga and helming the esoteric Suckle. But over the years, the reputation of The Vaselines has grown, especially in the US.

Cobain in particular had highlighted the chemistry between Kelly and McKee, as songwriters and performers. When the pair reformed The Vaselines a couple of years ago for a one-off benefit gig, that enduring chemistry allowed them to pick up where they had left off. Their casual liaison led to their first dates in the US - ecstatically received - and a mere 21 years since the release of Dum Dum, they have finally produced a follow-up album, recorded in 13 days with their backing buddies Stevie Jackson and Bob Kildea from Belle & Sebastian and Michael McGaughrin from the 1990s, which has practically doubled their catalogue of songs.

These self-confessed "snotty kids" are now older and allegedly wiser, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from some of the gleefully juvenile lyrics on Sex With An X. The Vaselines still make pop music that is proud to be bratty and throwaway.Their catchiest moments sound like adult nursery rhymes. The album's title track, for instance, gets straight to the point, capturing illicit pleasures pithily with Kelly's singalong lyric "feels so good, it must be bad for me, let's do it, let's do it again" and then riffs on the same theme and structure for the next three minutes, with McKee cooing in the background.

Mouth To Mouth is likewise heady with adolescent sexual anguish and desire. The fact that it is sung by a pair of fortysomethings doesn't seem to be an issue.

They envisage religious conflict as a playground dust-up on My God's Bigger Than Your God and blow raspberries at the prevailing nostalgic view of the 80s as all Dayglo naffness, synthpop and private yachts (insert your preferred clich) on the breezy, jangling I Hate The 80s ("because the 80s were shit").

But this is one of the few tracks on Sex With An X which could just as easily have fitted on their debut album. Elsewhere, there is evidence of (probably unwitting) progress. Right from the start, Kelly and McKee cited the duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra as an inspiration; here, they successfully tap into their baleful/innocent dynamic on The Devil's Inside Me, a dark, stealthy country/rockabilly tale of domestic violence and emotional displacement, and conduct typically Nancy'n'Lee dialogues on both Turning It On and Poison Pen, which concern, respectively, the before and after of a relationship.

Kelly and McKee were once a couple themselves and they can still work that angle. A painful split is expressed as a succession of foodie metaphors on Overweight But Over You which sets the solace of comfort eating to a chorus cribbed from Sweet's Wig-Wam Bam. Whitechapel, on the other hand, is haunting, eerie, even sinister - three adjectives one would never have associated with The Vaselines Mk 1.

The brooding lullaby coda is called Exit The Vaselines. No one, least of all Kelly and McKee it seems, knows what happens next. But this time round, whether Sex With An X is a curtain call or a fresh start, let's appreciate The Vaselines while we've still got them.