The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History (1992)

Perhaps you've seen this band's name scrawled in black marker across a shredded T-shirt of fan Kurt Cobain. A Glasgow group that broke up in 1991, the Vaselines sound inane and annoying at first spin. But then the Sesame Street song style and garage-band guitar flailing — coupled with an errant bike horn or violin — gets trapped in your mental ozone for days. In The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History, these recovering Catholics tackle subjects as complex as atheism and murder and as mundane as a particularly chafing bike seat, all with lyrics so simple a 6-year-old could have written them. Front man Eugene Kelly sings it best: ''I'm a teenage Jesus superstar/And when my mom complains about my hair/I say, 'Hey Mom, I just don't care.''' And we don't care if this disc gets jammed in our CD player forever. A-