Sex With An X

The Vaselines have succeeded where so many failed; they have remained true to the appeal of their first album while acknowledging that they are older and can’t really get away with singing about cats and riding horses with a wink and a smirk.

Still, it's also not quite satisfying to hear 40-year-olds come back to what they were doing half their lifetime ago and approach it exactly the same way. Pretend the album was recorded at the same sessions as 1989's Dum-Dum, and it's a kick. But it wasn't.

The tale of how Kurt Cobain's devotion brought a whole new audience and popularity to Scottish ramshackle indie rockers The Vaselines is by now a well rehearsed one. The core duo, songwriters and vocalists Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee, were well served by their most famous fanboy, whose cover versions of Molly's Lips, Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam and Son Of A Gun elevated them from the indie obscurity in which they would quite probably otherwise have languished, having broken up not long after the release of their full-length album, Dum Dum in 1989.