The Vaselines - Sex With An X (on Subpop)
I am a big Vaselines fan. The whole thing. The songs. The breaking up the day their debut album Dum-Dum was released. Their being one of Kurt Cobain's favourite bands. Eugene Kelly performing with Nirvana at the Reading Festival looking like a fan who's somehow managed to raid the stage.
Having seen various clips of them recently, looking fairly big in Japan, I'm very pleased that they have now released that notoriously difficult second album. Twenty-one years is way longer than even the Stone Roses took ,but, unlike The Second Coming, Sex With An X has avoided those difficulties and definitely delivers what a fan would want from them.
It was released yesterday in the UK and today (the 14th) in the US and Canada. According to their twitter site if you use the code PICKDEAL you can get $3.00 off if you buy it on Amazon.
Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee met in Glasgow, in the mid-1980's, on a bus on the way to school. They became boyfriend and girlfriend and later recorded two EPs and an album. They split in 1989. So it was possible to listen to their whole back catalogue in under an hour.
But that Nirvana link has always meant they've punched above their weight. Nirvana covered 3 of their songs - Molly's Lips, Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam and Son Of A Gun. They're not fed up yet with the references to it. "It's part of our history," Kelly says, "Nirvana covered our songs and put our music out into the world...The only thing I find funny is the comments people post on YouTube clips of us performing saying 'Why are they playing a Nirvana song?'"
They are performing the new songs for the first time tonight on Marc Riley's show on 6 Music. The 10 date UK tour starts at the Bongo Rooms in Edinburgh tomorrow and there will then be a tour of the US, Canada and Mexico.
So far my favourites on the album have been the title track Sex With An X, The Devil's Inside Me, Overweight But Over You - "hey I'm a fat man...I'm a fat man" - and Mouth to Mouth, which has a bit of a Jesus and Mary Chain vibe, but I try and find that everywhere...
Listen to the title track at the bottom of this post and to the whole thing on The Guardian's album stream.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/sep/09/vaselines-sex-x-album-stream
Here's Eugene Kelly at Reading. He says, "It was a weird experience, I didn't have my glasses on, so I just saw all these pink blobs - that was the audience. I was on a high from it for about a week afterwards."
Sex With An X by subpop
