"If you prefer your food straight off your girlfriend's stomach rather than on a plate, then The Vaselines are probably the group you've been waiting for." (Fanzine article)Stephen Pastel's 53rd & 3rd label could be described as the sunglasses-wearing older brother to its fey Bristol counterpart Sarah Records' shy little sister. Still, in spite of pop bands like the Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh (whose long out of print back catalogue is in dire need of a reissue), horny hellions The Vaselines were always misfits within the roster. Penning songs with titles like 'Monsterpussy' and 'Rory Rides Me Raw', boyfriend/girlfriend duo of Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee - a Kim'n'Thurston-esque golden couple for the C86-ers - were always more in line with the Jesus and Mary Chain's leather-clad rock and rollisms rather than the so-called "cutie" scene. The duo made two EPs and a full-length album before calling it a day (later briefly reforming at the invitation of some guy called Kurt), and these are reissued on Enter The Vaselines, along with a bonus disc of unreleased material and some fantastic sleevenotes - featuring interviews by Pastel and legendary twee champion Everett True - in order to mark the band’s 20th anniversary. Disc one is a straight-up remaster of their entire back-catalogue - nineteen songs, clocking in at under an hour - previously released on Sub Pop's now-deleted The Way of the Vaselines compilation. Most of these songs need no introduction to certain groups of anorak (or plaid)-clad individuals; 'Son of a Gun' and 'Dying for It' sound as fresh and inappropriate as ever, smothered in barbed wire guitars, kiddy keyboards and the wonderfully indifferent vocals of Eugene and Frances, albeit never quite reaching the Lee-and-Nancy territory to which they allegedly aspired.The album's buzzsaw barrage is nigh-on relentless, 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam''s folksy charms aside, but 'Sex Sux (Amen)''s God-baiting rampage and the galloping (ahem) 'The Day I Was a Horse' have an irrepresibly ramshackle charm that's hard to ignore, and even more difficult not to love. The band also had a pretty warped sense of humour, which this compilation represents in full force; there’s the youngster-hipster pastiche of 'Teenage Superstars' ("When mum complains about my clothes, I say hey mum - leave me alone!") and, of course, the band's ridiculous cover of Divine's gender-bending classic 'You Think You're a Man', stretched out to six minutes of lo-fi disco madness, complete with exaggerated sex noises.The second disc takes an alternative look at the Vaselines' development in a before-and-after style; its first eight songs date from 1986, the band's first year together, with the final nine come from a show two years later, when the band had expanded to include a real drummer; three four-track demos show the early stages of the pair's songwriting, with tracks like 'Rosary Job' showcasing more straightforwardly shambling sound (though the subject matter remains filthy as ever - look it up...). The live material - a fifteen-minute bootleg from an early gig in Bristol and a 1988 London show - is amusingly volatile, threatening to fall apart at any moment, and very often doing so. The tracks are interspersed with some gloriously deadpan banter ("We're going to have a whip-round for Charlie - he's got cancer...of the drumstick"), but would be of little interest to anyone other than ardent fans whose copies of The Way of... have been played to demolition.This compilation has clearly been put together with a lot of love and attention, which can't be faulted, and as the only available collection of the band’s material, it's damn near essential for anyone with even a passing interest in indiepop, or that strand of N*rvana fans eager to hear what made their hero tick. The Vaselines lived fast, died young, and left an extremely fuckable corpse just waiting to be discovered; why wouldn't you want to enter The Vaselines? 92%The Vaselines on Mypsace