Neumos, I find your all-ages show configurations endlessly baffling. You just never know until you walk in the door whether there will be cleverly constructed cages, or if someone is going to be confined to the balcony. I’m sure that there’s some sort of complicated algorithm that drives the whole thing, I just can’t figure out what it is.

Last night had the under 21 set upstairs in the balcony, which was the way to do it given how sparsely populated it seemed to be up there. The Vaselines are mostly the musical property of the Nirvana generation, for better or worse, and the floor was full.

Hallways, who opened the night, do that electrofuzz psychedlic country thing that I can ususally take or leave, but they closed their set with a Pink Floyd cover. I’m still torn about that cover: on the one hand, it’s Pink Floyd, for crying out loud. But on the other hand, it was a really good “Comfortably Numb.” (PS, Hallways: I’m glad it was your tshirts that someone was throwing, and not empty beer cans like I originally thought.)

It’s…pretty much impossible to talk about the Vaselines without getting all giddy and downright gooey, and there are not enough synonyms for ‘adorable’ available in the English language. It must be such a strange thing to become famous like that after you’ve broken up, and because your main superfan is Kurt Cobain, to stay kind of famous forever without actually playing shows. The Vaselines seem to handle the last 20 years with grace and extreme good humor, and put on a show just as hilarious and happy and dirty as it must have been back in the beginning.

They opened with “Son of a Gun,” brought Shane from Hallways out to work the bicycle horn on “Molly’s Lips,” and debuted two new songs just to prove that they haven’t been completely lazy all this time. Live, the Vaselines sound just like the album, and of course the songs are fun and fantastic but the real best part is the banter. Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly are just unfailingly charming, joking about Hare Krishna and going to prison for using the juices of young boys as a skincare product, calling Jesus a cunt for giving Eugene Monopoly for Christmas instead of a bike (last year Jesus was compared to David Blaine), offering to marry audience members so that Frances can get a green card. You just want to go out and have twelve beers with them, because you know it would be hilarious.

After the main set ended the audience skipped right over clapping for an encore and went straight into stomping, starting with “Rory Rides Me Raw” and ending with “Dum Dum,” with a disco ball and a gleeful “You Think You’re a Man” in the middle. And then somehow it was over, and time for a nightcap to calm our excitement before bed. I hope that the new songs means they’ll be coming back someday, maybe sooner than sixteen years from now.