Though The Vaselines were already a band a few good years before Kurt Cobain and company exploded into the scene, I only got to know about them through Nirvana. Kurt Cobain loved The Vaselines so much that he once said (and probably still would be saying it if he were still alive) that they were the best pop band in the world, and Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee are his “most favorite songwriters in the whole world”.
I love Cobain’s songwriting, so the song writers he looked up to were worth checking out. The first Vaselines LP I got was Dum-Dum, it was 1991. After listening to it, I bought their live album, The Vaselines- Beat Happening, and the next two albums that came after it. Then they simply stopped making albums, and I forgot about them.
Now, here they are again, with Enter the Vaselines. But there’s nothing new because this album is simply a deluxe reissue of their 1992 compilation The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History. Okay, they put in a second disc, which contain demos and live performances and you have something that is worth adding to your collection of records.
Time changes everything. Now, 18 years after I first heard them, Enter the Vaselines comes to me as so crude. How could I have loved punk during my college days? Now, I cannot stand the amateurish guitar lines and the lyrics that could only be written by songwriters so engrossed with the grotesqueness of sex.
But I am not saying that Enter the Vaselines is not worth your time, it has a saving grace: the attitude and the charm of the crude vocals, how it serves as the perfect wrapper for the ear-grabbing melodies that this band manages to churn out despite their musical incompetence. Another thing that saves this album is the humor. ”Molly’s Lips,” “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” and “Son of a Gun,” are familiar to you because Nirvana covered them. But listen to the original versions, and you’ll hear something else.
All in all, Enter the Vaselines is still worth checking out. I’m giving it a score of 6 out of 10.
