Kevin Bronson on October 22nd, 2010

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The following thought occurred to a certain music writer Tuesday night during Superchunk’s thwackingly good set at the Music Box: I should have name-checked Superchunk a lot more over the past few years of scribbling about buzz bands who aspire to high-energy guitar rock.

The Chapel Hill, N.C. quartet – visiting to promote “Majesty Shredding,” their first album since 2001 – gave the (woefully under-attended) Music Box 90 minutes of razor-edged playing and teenage exuberance. That it came from the fortysomething bodies of Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Jim Wilbur and Jon Wurster made it that much sweeter. No nostalgia trip, this: The foursome played the final stop on its tour as if it were trying to win fans and impress a record label, not like a band that’s been around for two decades and (McCaughan and Balance, anyway) founded a record label (Merge.)

• ||| Photos by Carl Pocket

Despite having been relegated to a part-time band, Superchunk this year released an album that’s as good or better than any of their eight studio records. And it showed from the way new songs like “Digging for Something,” “Rosemarie” and “Crossed Wires” fit in with favorites such as “Hyper Enough,” “Slack Motherf*cker,” “Like a Fool” and “Precision Auto.” McCaughan bounced all over the stage; Ballance set the standard for an audience of not-so-youthful pogo-ers; and Wilbur and Wurster were studies in focused fury. The quartet gave two encores, and one included, McCaughan said, “a song by a Los Angeles resident who I’m pretty sure is not in the house tonight,” Stephin Merritt (the Magnetic Fields’ “100,000 Fireflies”). Oh, and a Misfits cover.

The appearance by Scotland’s the Vaselines – back after 20 or so years themselves with a new album “Sex With an X” – gave the bill a once-in-a-lifetime feel. The band, famously championed by Kurt Cobain, reformed last year about two decades after principals Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee had gone their own ways. Not many would have predicted it, but their comeback album “Sex With an X” (out last month on Sub Pop) is a brilliant piece of boy-girl ping-pong.

McKee and Kelly were as irreverent and charming as ever – McKee with her salty stage banter and Kelly with his vaguely weary air that he had his tongue in cheek before most of you had cheeks. The Vaselines’ aesthetic is melody wrapped in fuzz wrapped in irony, and none of it was lost on the veteran Music Box crowd, which delighted to the new song “I Hate the ’80s” as much as the oldie “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” once covered by Nirvana.

Seattle’s Telekinesis, performing as a three-piece, opened the evening with a set of rough-hewn power-pop – far less crisp than in previous L.A. outings. Frontman Michael Lerner (who also drums) seemed on this night weaker of voice (either that or the guitars were too gnarly) but still managed to find the mark on the winsome “Coast of Carolina.”