When the Vaselines reunited a couple of years ago, they didn't pretend they had much to add to what they'd accomplished in the late 1980s: two EPs and a brief album, all of them brisk, frothy, wittily stupid, magnificently hooky, and horny enough to shatter granite. But their reunion also seemed like a "fuck it, why not?" move. The Glasgow-based duo of Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly were never exactly careerists-- it's not their problem that Nirvana covered three of their songs-- and their 2008-2009 tour seemed like a one-off frolic rather than any kind of commitment or cash-in.
Yet here they are again, backed up by members of Belle and Sebastian and the 1990s, and produced by Jamie Watson (who recorded them the first time around, too). The album's got a cute title, with the double meaning of "check out how hot we are" and "hooking up again with the person you used to date." Almost any of these simple two-riff, verse-chorus songs would have made a perfectly acceptable addition to their original records (and they're better than anything either Kelly or McKee has come up with since they broke up); in particular, "I Hate the 80's" is a welcome bit of grumpy oldsterism and "Turning It On" is built on juicy love/hate sentiments. The band's twanging, strummy arrangements and McKee and Kelly's bedroom-eyed thrust-and-parry are exactly like they were the first time around.
That's what's disconcerting about Sex with an X. Significant artistic development of any kind probably would've been a bad idea for this band-- they were, as the saying goes, small but perfectly formed. 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.
It's instructive to compare the Vaselines to the Pastels, their contemporaries and scenemates (with whom Kelly also played). The Pastels also started off with a focus on untamed youth and speed and simplicity, and gradually came to abandon all of those things in favor of what made them distinctive: the chalk and grit of their voices and the smoky drift of their songs. Kelly and McKee, on the other hand, treat the Vaselines as a vehicle for a particular sound and attitude. They've got their formula, and they're sticking to it, whether or not it's got anything more to yield. "Feels so good it must be bad for me/ Let's do it, let's do it again," they sing on the title track. They know perfectly well that what they're doing is retrograde and maybe even beneath them, and it's hard to blame them, because it's the best they've ever had anyway.
