The Scottish indie-rockers are back with prototypical tunes and more confident-sounding guitar work.
Most of us were not cool enough to hear about Glasgow indie-pop darlings the Vaselines until after Kurt Cobain championed them as one of his favorite bands and Nirvana covered their 1987 songs āMollyās Lipsā and āSon of a Gunā on Incesticide.
āOne Lost Yearā is the first single from V for Vaselines, the bandās third album following 2010ās Sex with an X, and, remarkably, it sounds as timeless as all their other recordings. Band founders Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee sing with the same youthful voices that first hit tape in the late ā80s. And the melodies here bob and bounce with the same balance of innocence and tension that helped pioneer the twee-pop subgenre.
If anything sounds noticeably different from the bandās beginnings, itās the guitars: Back in the day, they were one of the first to play with slightly out-of-tune guitarsāan endearing quality that had indie nerds such as a young Pavement and Sebadoh deliberately detuning their machine heads to get that couldnāt-care-less indie sound.
The guitars here are very much in tune and wield a more confident prowess in playing than Kellyās prior penchants for sounding as if he just pulled his guitar from a soft case and hit āRecordā before tuning. There are even moments in the songās solo that squeal and distort with the discordant bravado of fellow Glasgow musicians the Jesus and Mary Chain. thevaselines.co.uk