The Vaselines - Sex With An X (Sub Pop)
Formed in 1987 but rather swiftly disbanding again in 1989 after just one album release (well, before it, actually), Scottish twee-garage types The Vaselines are probably more known as 'that band Kurt Cobain worshipped', and Nirvana consequently covered. Cobain once claimed that Frances and Eugene were his "most favourite songwriters in the world", an adulation well-deserved; the frank, oftentimes delicious and hilariously filthy lyricism is rife throughout 'Sex With An Ex', just as it was through 'Dum Dum', an album more than two decades its senior.

Album opener 'Ruined' starts off curiously with a distorted, child-like rhyme, before blasting off suddenly into a fast, monotonic riff that is so quintessentially The Vaselines it practically kicks you square in the jaw. They may be older, but that juvenile aloofness hasn't faded - they still sound as cynical and blunt as they did twenty years ago when they were teenage Jesus superstars. "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 80s because the 80s were shit", they proclaim. A rather apt message for today's young hipster massive, perhaps?

'Sex With An X', is, without using too many adjectives, boisterous, loud, melodious in the simplest but most effective ways, and a refreshing turn to form from a band that shouldn't have faded away in the first place. More, please.
TW

Review originally published by CMU Music Network: www.cmumusicnetwork.co.uk

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