Maxwell’s; Wed 9
Southpaw; July 10

The past few years have seen some rather unlikely alt-rock reunions—who’d have thought that Kim Deal and Black Francis would bury the hatchet?—but the reanimation of this long-defunct Scottish indie-pop outfit has to be among the most surprising. For one thing, there’s a good chance that plenty of the fans planning to attend these shows—the Vaselines’ first-ever American dates, preceding an appearance next weekend at Sub Pop’s 20th-anniversary festival in Seattle—weren’t even aware of the band’s existence during its original late-’80s run; the Vaselines received a postmortem boost when Nirvana covered a few of their tunes (including the twee-folk gem “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” and the garage-pop jangler “Molly’s Lips”) on Incesticide and MTV Unplugged.

Also, it’s hard to imagine what an extra two decades of experience will have done to the music that singer-guitarists Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee made together. As Kelly more or less admitted in the liner notes to The Way of the Vaselines, Sub Pop’s 1992 release of the band’s entire body of recorded work, the Vaselines drew much of their considerable charm from the fact that they couldn’t really play their instruments. “We only wanted to have some fun,” Kelly wrote. These days both principals (who’ll be backed by members of Belle and Sebastian) carry on their own solo careers, which means it’s probably safe to assume that their skills have improved. Might the sweetly scrappy have turned sleek?