Okay, let's tell it like it really is – shall we? The Vaselines are one of the greatest inadvertent success stories in rock history. This was a band who, at the height of its' productivity, released a couple of EPs and one LP before crumbling when main members Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee decided it wasn't fun anymore. Those EPs and album were then combined (with a few odds and ends appended) into one cheaply made compilation (rumor has it that The Way Of The Vaselines was mastered from cassette copies of everything – that's about as low budget as it gets) almost as an afterthought.
…And that was it. The Way Of The Vaselines remained in print while everything else fell by the way side. The band would likely have become one of the smallest, campiest footnotes on the development of indie rock had Kurt Cobain not become enamored with the album and sung its' praises into every journalist's tape recorder he could. With the rabid mania of Nirvana fans in the early Nineties, The Vaselines were able to catch enough run-off popularity to stimulate sales and interest again, and the band even briefly reformed to open for Nirvana at one point. Given that flabbergasting result and interest, it could be argud that the public's image of The Vaselines as folk/cult heroes if completely the work of Nirvana but, for their own part, McKee and Kelly kept it all simple for everyone; other than that one tour, the band was done as a creative entity – and they remained that way.
Well, sort of. The Vaselines stayed broken up – until now. Now – twenty years after that one full-length album came out and eighteen after their watershed Way Of… was released, Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee have revived The Vaselines and made a new record, much to the raised eyebrows of everyone, everywhere. From a strictly objective standpoint, a reaction of shock is justified; this was a band who made it on camp, innocence and a total ignorance to musical fashion – which were all reasons why The Way Of The Vaselines had done as well as it has over the years. Now though? All bets are off – a reunion/return is the height of cynical competence and goes perfectly against the heart and spirit of the band. That said, Sex With An X will already have eyes squinted in a hard, over-critical stare, and understandably so. That pre-conceived critical stance seems justified as a battered cassette warbles out some unintelligible refrain to open the record in “Ruined” too; listeners and long-time fans would expect something like this of The Vaselines (diminished values and all), but there's twee and then there's prickly irony, and that understanding coupled with bloated sounding guitars which dog the rest of the track fall well onto the ironic side of the line. It doesn't bode well.
The obvious concern at The Vaselines' reappearance is that it won't really be a return of the low-fi and cutesy band at all, but a meticulously measured enactment of the idea of The Vaselines, and “Ruined” does foreshadow that possibility. Happily though, it doesn't take McKee and Kelly long to fall back into form.
After “Ruined” lives up to its' name and sends a worried chill listeners, business picks up as The Vaselines lighten up on the album's title track; the guitars suddenly soften and lose every vestige of treatment and the singers realign their call-and-response vocalese to sit flush with their old winning combination. The twee is back with an earnest vengeance and, while it's not so innocent anymore, the pop in the band's soul remains blessedly undiminished. After taking a few tracks to build up a head of steam, sons like “Turning It On,” “Overweight Bu Over You” and “Poison Pen” pick up just where The Vaselines left off in 1990 but, while the sound remains the same, the band doesn't try to enter a time warp; time has passed and the band members have grown up and they don't try to ignore that. Beneath the twee, McKee and Kelly lace some new ideas and much-improved songwriting chops into the proceedings that only really reveal themselves when listeners stop, think about it, and go back to hear it again to make sure. For example, listeners will do a double-take when McKee throws the sweet, Debbie Harry-caliber kiss-off “It's turning you on but I'm turning away” into “Turning It On” and the duo takes a series of cheap shots at the Eighties in “I Hate The 80's” (choice line: “What do you know? You weren't there/ it wasn't all Duran Duran/You want the truth? Well this is it/ I hate the 80's cause the 80's were shit”) before doing the same thing to organized religion on “My God's Bigger Than Your God.” In each of those cases (and more), The Vaselines show off that they've grown and matured as songwriters from the wildly repetitive fare that characterized “Son Of A Gun” and “Turnaround,” but aren't interested in going grey and leaving the pop domain to do it. Because of that steadfast adherence to their beloved pop idiom, what listeners get in this presentation of The Vaselines v. 2.0 is a solid and believable extension of where the band started rather than the mawkish cash-grab it could easily have been. Will Sex With An X get appreciated for that effort without the assistance of outside star power? It will by some listeners, certainly. Will it be huge? Probably not, but that's not the point of this record; Sex With An X is The Vaselines' proof that they can exist again and that they are able to write songs of comparable quality to those that appeared on The Way Of The Vaselines without necessarily becoming a parody of themselves. The band succeeds in that endeavor on Sex With An X – it'll be interesting to see if the band stops again now that its' made this point, or if they'll keep pushing into new territory from here.
Artist:
www.myspace.com/thevaselinesband
www.subpop.com/artists/the_vaselines
Download:
The Vaselines – “I Hate The 80's” – Sex With An X
Album:
Sex With An X is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
