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Album Review: Paul Westerberg, "49:00" (self-released)
Paul Westerberg's immediate post-Replacements output always felt a bit too mannered compared to his previous unhinged and slightly drunken output with his Minneapolis brothers. From everybody's losers, Westerberg sprung well-heeled into a second career as a slick and popular purveyor of Hollywood soundtrack music.
Eventually Westerberg lost his niche, got dropped by his label and returned to a semblance of his old sound (or at least aesthetics), but many fans stopped dropping by, and his material began to acquire a sheen of indifference that not even an impending and overdue Replacements revival could overcome. Then Paul discovered the Internet.
That someone discovered it for him is more likely, given Westerberg's legendary relationship with computers (he has never touched one, he's claimed). "49:00" is a 43-minute-long album in the form of one long recorded track that claims to be six minutes longer, and insists in its subtitle on grabbing exactly that portion of your time/life.
It does. Released several months before Westerberg's 49th birthday, the aging Replacement has issued a testament to recklessness, if nothing else, self-releasing the set and selling it for exactly 49 cents over the 'net. It will be the best 49 cents you've spent in a very long time. Contained in the recording's 43 minutes are the singer/songwriter's loosest, most exhilarating musical moments since the '80s, the work of a man who finally came back home from wherever he had been out wandering.
There are roughly 22 "tracks" present on the set, presented without song titles or gaps between tunes; songs start and end without much logic, and sometimes two or even three songs appear to be happening at the same time, with various bits of static and spoken word thrown in to boot. But when Westerberg is not fiddling with the mixer knobs, he's creating a ragged return to the richly earned niche he created as a young man. "49:00"'s premise enough would have earned him a punk rock credit, but the sounds inside more than justify the Barnum-like marketing scheme.
Westerberg's voice has changed slightly over the years, deepening at the corners, which only adds texture now to his best work. And it wouldn't resemble a 'Mats trainwreck if it didn't include a fragmented medley of popular hits, so Westerberg, who played all the instruments on the album, doesn't disappoint here either, offering a short but sweet conflagration that manages to mangle together The Beatles, Hank Williams, Steppenwolf, The Rolling Stones and several other classic rock superstars. Later, Westerberg's son, Johnny, makes an appearance on the album's final "song."
Paul Westerberg always did his best work when he was clinging by his fingertips to something that was trying desperately to throw him off. After a decade and a half spent searching mostly without success for the right kind of precipice, Westerberg looks ready to put himself into highly productive peril again.
