Album review: The Vaselines – Enter The Vaselines

I was fifteen in 1992 when The Way of The Vaselines (the predecessor to this renamed and expanded reissue) was first released. I’d be lying if I said I had a copy, but I’d certainly heard some of the songs a number of times – at parties, perhaps, or on hand-painted C90 compilations passed from friend to friend, sometimes across the length of the country by mail. Ah, nostalgia… fifteen’s a great age to be, although I wouldn’t want to go back; you’re just discovering so many interlocking things about the way the world works that every single day seems like some hand-crafted revelatory drama written just for you, directed by some unseen and capricious force intent on making you laugh and cry at the same time.

Hence it was a pretty good age to encounter The Vaselines, too, because their music reflects that uniquely teenage mix of braggadocio and bafflement, confidence and cringing self-loathing – possibly the very qualities that drove Kurt Cobain to claim they were his favourite songwriters of all time. Kurt’s public praise came well after the band had originally split, but it raised enough retrospective interest in The Vaselines for Sub Pop to collect together their complete recorded output and package it up for the kids in 1992. It’s probably a mark of their influence – or at least their stylistic foresight, or perhaps instinct – that the bulk of the material still sounded pretty contemporary at that point, given it was all originally recorded between 1986 and 1989. That studied knowing nonchalance, the rough imperfections of the playing and singing, the sly and kooky playful flirtatiousness… well, it made sense to me at the time, at least.

And listening back to Enter The Vaselines, I can still hear why. Only now I can hear the other side of Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee’s lyrics, which saw adolescence through slightly older eyes than my own. If pop music is teenage lust incarnate, then The Vaselines had the knack of distilling it right from the start; listen to album opener “Son of a Gun”, and try to tell me that’s not exactly how you felt about the first girl or boy you fell for. Then try to tell me that “Rory Rides Me Raw” doesn’t sum up what you wanted to do about those feelings.

As with most retrospectives, the real joy of Enter The Vaselines is the joy of listening to a band grow into themselves. That sunny summer holidays vibe never quite disappears, but it becomes tempered with increasing layers of grit and proto-grunge nihilism as we move through the Dying For It EP (featuring “Molly’s Lips”, which would later reach so many listeners as a Nirvana cover (though minus the squeaky bicycle horn in the chorus), and the can’t-win-why-try drop-out anthem of “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”) and into Dum-Dum, their only full-length studio album. Here are Pixies-esque moments of ragged pop, dead-pan send-ups of punk rebellion… and more of that barely disguised sexual tension.

It’s good fun stuff, if your head’s open to that sort of thing, but there’s a lurking current of darkness beneath it; The Vaselines had a knack of making innocence seem dangerous, and danger innocent; a more postmodern reviewer than myself might attempt to suggest that was a response to the growing publicity around AIDS at the time, but it was just as likely the working out of artistic themes and preoccupations that occur in countless careers, be they famous or unnoticed. And hey, why overanalyse? The Vaselines made weird pop that wasn’t shite – and given the era (and locale) they were working in, that should be considered achievement enough to be worthy of praise

I dare say someone in their late teens today would find Enter The Vaselines a rather baffling proposition; there’s something timeless in there, but it probably takes a broader experience of music to be able to see where The Vaselines fit into the rock’n'roll timeline. And they surely do – not just as the proto-grunge fuzz band that made Dum-Dum, but also the quirky indie-pop duo they started out as. Compared to twenty years ago, young bands have easier and cheaper access to recording technology than ever before, and the muddy imperfections of The Vaseline‘s sonic stamp are only ever adopted as a deliberate affectation nowadays. Hell knows the live recordings of the second disc – while fascinating – aren’t exactly the sort of thing even the most commited retro outfits would try to replicate on purpose. But that spark, that willingness to go out on the metaphorical ledge and do something different? That ability to marry pop and intelligence? That’s no easier to find today than it was in 1986, which is why Enter the Vaselines is worth your time and money. Listen and learn.