Enter the Vaselines (Deluxe Edition) [2009 Remastered]

Famous superfans are both a blessing and a curse-- just ask the Vaselines. In 1992, at the urging of ardent admirer Kurt Cobain, Sub Pop released The Way of the Vaselines, a compilation of the short-lived and then-little-known band's extant recordings (a whopping 19 tracks). Hooray for them, right? Maybe. If the Vaselines originally slotted neatly into the mid-to-late 80s Scottish shambolic pop underground of the Pastels, Shop Assistants, and BMX Bandits, their origins-- and the band's actual recordings-- became overshadowed by a single factoid: They influenced Nirvana. Nirvana's (good-intentioned, I'm sure) covers of "Molly's Lips" and "Son of a Gun" were more-or-less faithful, bouncy renditions, but they lacked the humor, menace, and complexity of the naïvely played, ambivalently sung originals. And "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" has long been associated with Nirvana's funereal MTV Unplugged performance, during which Cobain caressed the sweetly sacrilegious song with the reverence due a cultural relic-- something it neither wanted nor deserved.

Sub Pop's new Enter the Vaselines 2xCD set of remastered originals and unreleased demos and live tracks gives listeners, now adequately distanced from Cobain's influence, an opportunity to reevaluate the band on its own terms. In his liner notes, journalist and eternal scenester Everett True, batting around words like "sordidness" and "depravity" and painting core duo Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee as subversive artistes, probably overcorrects the Vaselines story. The slipcase's cover photo, featuring a glowering McKee and listless, stoned-looking Kelly, does an ace job of reinforcing this view, even as the set's musical contents tell a different tale.

As the former romantic couple has repeatedly asserted in interviews (including one conducted for inclusion in the set by Pastel Stephen McRobbie), the band was originally a lark, and many of their songs were written for a laugh by horny but essentially pretty wholesome kids with time on their hands. Early tracks-- "Rory Rides Me Raw", with its charmingly awful double entendres, and Divine cover "You Think You're a Man" with its juvenile, erm, climactic ending-- succinctly make that case. (They never abandoned the sexually provocative, however, going on to record songs like "Monsterpussy" and "The Day I Was a Horse".)

The Vaselines became a little more accomplished and professional over the course of their short run, ditching their drum machine for flesh-and-blood bandmates and investing greater effort, including actual guitar solos and orchestral arrangements (okay, "Sunbeam" has a viola), into their second EP, Dying for It, and only full-length, Dum-Dum. But as this career survey suggests, the band was at its best when they were at their worst, when they sounded like rank amateurs in the throes of DIY fever-- not to mention, love. Kelly and McKee's chemistry, their playful vocal trade-offs, and flirtatious innuendo are what make a song like "Gun" something more than anonymous C86 ephemera. And make them hard to cover well.

With their dirty mouths and pretty faces, pop perspicacity and knack for making a bloody racket, there's no question the Vaselines were worth rescuing from obscurity. And now that the original duo is touring for the first time in 20 years-- without any new product-- Sub Pop's compilation redux is, from a marketing perspective, understandable. Whether fans who already own the first Sub Pop compilation (which is still in print and less expensive) need to cough up cash for this second release isn't as clear. The 17-track bonus disc is fun to hear, particularly the demos for the unreleased "Rosary Job" and "Red Poppy", but it's hardly a game-changer. And considering the Vaselines' studio recordings were almost as fuzzy and slipshod as their demos and live tracks, the audio fidelity upgrade, while nice to have, probably won't sway the lo-fi-loving hardcores, nor should it.