Post by GoddamnJob290 on Jul 30, 2008 10:16:29 GMT -5
www.stereosubversion.com/album-reviews/07-30-2008/paul-westerberg/
Kinda wordy, but here it is:
Paul Westerberg-49:00
Rating: 8.5 / 10
“I never liked being part of a group or a team or anything. I want no part of it… I like to be alone and have my own idea.” -Paul Westerberg, 1984
Despite inexplicable urgings by music fans to take on a musical/business relationship with Guns ‘n’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson, Minnesotan visual artist Chris Mars, and anyone silly enough to try and match the melodic insanity of fallen indie guitar hero Bob Stinson, singer/songwriter/miscreant Paul Westerberg has plunked along quietly on his current path, all in the face of obstacles such as kiddie soundtracks (how else will an underground music legend get any kind of college fund going?), screwdriver impalement, and continued attention on some negligible little quartet that he was involved in during the Reagan administration that doesn’t deserve further mention by anyone ever in any context.
He’s a guy who, sometimes for better and almost as often for worse, has always followed his own muse, whether that means writing songs about dyslexic hearts, riffs that beg to be members of the Rolling Stones song catalogue, or covering an old Sammy Davis Jr. standard in such barely releasable, warble throated fashion as to warm my cold heart with new blood every time I hear it. Unlike, say, Thurston Moore, Westerberg never embraced his status as indie rock hero, though his recent spat of homemade basement records do retain his credibility as such. However, also unlike, say, Michael Stipe, he wouldn’t allow himself a straight ride from his grassroots beginning to ultimate commercial prominence, even if bland power ballads like “Runaway Wind” seemed to indicate that he was willing to pander a bit if needed be. Lesson learned; if you pledge no allegiance, then you don’t have to break any.
Finished on a Monday, given to his manager on a Tuesday, and released the following Monday, 49:00 is 44 minutes of music that recalls the following things: The Beatles’ “Revolution #9,” Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbet, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, lots of alt.country bands that sound like Paul Westerberg, an even more low rent version of Westerberg’s 2004 solo album Folker, a poorly made mix tape that your college crush made for you back in 1989, the rockers on Bob Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, and, of course, the kind of trashy punk/folk that Minnesotan twenty-somethings used to produce because they were awful people with little better to do. Think Soul Asylum before they went major label. It’s also a mere 49 cents to purchase (or 89 cents, depending on certain factors beyond my limited understanding) and it’s presented not as a collection of individual tracks, but one really long 44 minute track that you’ll either have to divide up using MP3 slicing technology (boo!) or fast forward through to get to the songs you like (booooooooo!!!!!). Oh, and there’s also no individual song titles, so you’ll have to make up your own.
Whereas Fun House by The Stooges (argued by many weirdos as being the greatest rock and roll album of all time) was possibly an unintentional representation of the average male’s emotional rollercoaster ride once the libido takes over, 49:00 may represent the decline of the average person’s attention span over a period of 45 minutes. The first songs are all presented in full length, though they do fade into each other, as if you were listening to a marginally well-run college radio broadcast. Starting with “Vistor’s Day” (or whatever it’s called), songs begin to get cut off before they’ve finished. Soon, little snippets of extraneous noises, weird choir vocals, and slabs of guitar distortion start popping up here and there. Instead of hearing the songs in full, you might only hear a chorus and a verse or we might join the song somewhere after its beginning.
With ten minutes remaining, 49:00 devolves completely into brief snippets of covers, counted among them: “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles, “Stupid Girl” by the Rolling Stones, “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Born To Be Wild” by Steppenwolf, and “I’m Eighteen” by Alice Cooper. We hear these songs only long enough to recognize them and then they’re gone. Eventually, Westerberg’s wandering psyche settles on a minute long run through of “I Think I Love You” before capping off the festivities with an unnamed punk rock original featuring shouts and hollers courtesy of his young son. I’ll be damned if the kid doesn’t have a better idea of what a punk vocalist should be than the average emo schmoe down at your typical watering hole.
I don’t know whether to call 49:00 ambitious or crazy. Certainly, there’s the connotation of “ha, I’m not even charging a dollar for this, so I can do whatever the hell I want!” and Westerberg has a reputation for following his muse at the audience’s expense, especially when that muse makes him do drunken “Iron Man” covers that neither he nor his band mates have any interest in finishing. Still, the full-length songs presented here are some of his best in recent years and the majority of the snippets are at least interesting. Sonically, Westerberg is still mining the same territory of the aforementioned Folker album, using a layered sound of vocal harmonies, acoustic and electric guitars, and drums that sound like the galloping of a masochistic horse with a sprained ankle. The key difference is that while Folker was ultimately both elevated and weighed down by its introspection, 49:00 sees Westerberg writing mainly about subjects other than himself, allowing for his cynical wordplay to be more character assassination and less self-flagellation.
“Who You Gonna Marry?” tells the story of an embittered wedding crasher (“I’ve heard you’re engaged/ silently, I’m enraged”) that pulls a Graduate, though one wonders if the results were the same. “Kentucky Rising” has a beautiful vocal harmony that goes well with its lyrics about early morning walks, Westerberg vindictively telling another “I don’t want to spoil your morning.” “Vistor’s Day” tells the story of an incarcerated soul who’s bummed than his kid isn’t coming to visit him and the punky “The Devil Raised A Good Boy” is allegedly a tribute to the fallen Johnny Thunders. The shorter snippets tend to just ram a phrase into the ground and get out. The country swing of “You’re My Darling” says little more than the title, while other short songs have ecstatic declarations of sobriety (“I’m clean! I’m clean! I’m clean!”) and abbreviated heart broken laments (“all the money goes straight to her arms”).
The album’s sole “heavy” moments comes smack in the middle, in pure Westerberg fashion. The minor key “Good Night, Sweet Prince” relates the death of a loved one in excruciating detail, jumping over the border from heartfelt to just really, really uncomfortable. So naked is the piece that Westerberg feels the need to dilute it somewhat by having snippets of other songs play over it. I doubt he’ll ever play the song live. Still, the rawness of these feelings is covered up somewhat by the upbeat “Out of My System” that immediately succeeds it. Elsewhere, the subject of divorce is tackled from the child’s perspective with the catchy fuzz pop of “Everyone’s Stupid (In My Family)”.
Whether this will go down as an oddity in the man’s catalog or as one of the all-time classics of his solo career remains to be seen, but at the very least, if you buy the album and hate it, you won’t feel like you’ve squandered a lot of money. That, my friends, is a fine, fine feeling.
Highlight Track: For better or worse, the whole thing.
Kinda wordy, but here it is:
Paul Westerberg-49:00
Rating: 8.5 / 10
“I never liked being part of a group or a team or anything. I want no part of it… I like to be alone and have my own idea.” -Paul Westerberg, 1984
Despite inexplicable urgings by music fans to take on a musical/business relationship with Guns ‘n’ Roses bassist Tommy Stinson, Minnesotan visual artist Chris Mars, and anyone silly enough to try and match the melodic insanity of fallen indie guitar hero Bob Stinson, singer/songwriter/miscreant Paul Westerberg has plunked along quietly on his current path, all in the face of obstacles such as kiddie soundtracks (how else will an underground music legend get any kind of college fund going?), screwdriver impalement, and continued attention on some negligible little quartet that he was involved in during the Reagan administration that doesn’t deserve further mention by anyone ever in any context.
He’s a guy who, sometimes for better and almost as often for worse, has always followed his own muse, whether that means writing songs about dyslexic hearts, riffs that beg to be members of the Rolling Stones song catalogue, or covering an old Sammy Davis Jr. standard in such barely releasable, warble throated fashion as to warm my cold heart with new blood every time I hear it. Unlike, say, Thurston Moore, Westerberg never embraced his status as indie rock hero, though his recent spat of homemade basement records do retain his credibility as such. However, also unlike, say, Michael Stipe, he wouldn’t allow himself a straight ride from his grassroots beginning to ultimate commercial prominence, even if bland power ballads like “Runaway Wind” seemed to indicate that he was willing to pander a bit if needed be. Lesson learned; if you pledge no allegiance, then you don’t have to break any.
Finished on a Monday, given to his manager on a Tuesday, and released the following Monday, 49:00 is 44 minutes of music that recalls the following things: The Beatles’ “Revolution #9,” Alex Chilton’s Like Flies On Sherbet, Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, lots of alt.country bands that sound like Paul Westerberg, an even more low rent version of Westerberg’s 2004 solo album Folker, a poorly made mix tape that your college crush made for you back in 1989, the rockers on Bob Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, and, of course, the kind of trashy punk/folk that Minnesotan twenty-somethings used to produce because they were awful people with little better to do. Think Soul Asylum before they went major label. It’s also a mere 49 cents to purchase (or 89 cents, depending on certain factors beyond my limited understanding) and it’s presented not as a collection of individual tracks, but one really long 44 minute track that you’ll either have to divide up using MP3 slicing technology (boo!) or fast forward through to get to the songs you like (booooooooo!!!!!). Oh, and there’s also no individual song titles, so you’ll have to make up your own.
Whereas Fun House by The Stooges (argued by many weirdos as being the greatest rock and roll album of all time) was possibly an unintentional representation of the average male’s emotional rollercoaster ride once the libido takes over, 49:00 may represent the decline of the average person’s attention span over a period of 45 minutes. The first songs are all presented in full length, though they do fade into each other, as if you were listening to a marginally well-run college radio broadcast. Starting with “Vistor’s Day” (or whatever it’s called), songs begin to get cut off before they’ve finished. Soon, little snippets of extraneous noises, weird choir vocals, and slabs of guitar distortion start popping up here and there. Instead of hearing the songs in full, you might only hear a chorus and a verse or we might join the song somewhere after its beginning.
With ten minutes remaining, 49:00 devolves completely into brief snippets of covers, counted among them: “Hello Goodbye” by the Beatles, “Stupid Girl” by the Rolling Stones, “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Born To Be Wild” by Steppenwolf, and “I’m Eighteen” by Alice Cooper. We hear these songs only long enough to recognize them and then they’re gone. Eventually, Westerberg’s wandering psyche settles on a minute long run through of “I Think I Love You” before capping off the festivities with an unnamed punk rock original featuring shouts and hollers courtesy of his young son. I’ll be damned if the kid doesn’t have a better idea of what a punk vocalist should be than the average emo schmoe down at your typical watering hole.
I don’t know whether to call 49:00 ambitious or crazy. Certainly, there’s the connotation of “ha, I’m not even charging a dollar for this, so I can do whatever the hell I want!” and Westerberg has a reputation for following his muse at the audience’s expense, especially when that muse makes him do drunken “Iron Man” covers that neither he nor his band mates have any interest in finishing. Still, the full-length songs presented here are some of his best in recent years and the majority of the snippets are at least interesting. Sonically, Westerberg is still mining the same territory of the aforementioned Folker album, using a layered sound of vocal harmonies, acoustic and electric guitars, and drums that sound like the galloping of a masochistic horse with a sprained ankle. The key difference is that while Folker was ultimately both elevated and weighed down by its introspection, 49:00 sees Westerberg writing mainly about subjects other than himself, allowing for his cynical wordplay to be more character assassination and less self-flagellation.
“Who You Gonna Marry?” tells the story of an embittered wedding crasher (“I’ve heard you’re engaged/ silently, I’m enraged”) that pulls a Graduate, though one wonders if the results were the same. “Kentucky Rising” has a beautiful vocal harmony that goes well with its lyrics about early morning walks, Westerberg vindictively telling another “I don’t want to spoil your morning.” “Vistor’s Day” tells the story of an incarcerated soul who’s bummed than his kid isn’t coming to visit him and the punky “The Devil Raised A Good Boy” is allegedly a tribute to the fallen Johnny Thunders. The shorter snippets tend to just ram a phrase into the ground and get out. The country swing of “You’re My Darling” says little more than the title, while other short songs have ecstatic declarations of sobriety (“I’m clean! I’m clean! I’m clean!”) and abbreviated heart broken laments (“all the money goes straight to her arms”).
The album’s sole “heavy” moments comes smack in the middle, in pure Westerberg fashion. The minor key “Good Night, Sweet Prince” relates the death of a loved one in excruciating detail, jumping over the border from heartfelt to just really, really uncomfortable. So naked is the piece that Westerberg feels the need to dilute it somewhat by having snippets of other songs play over it. I doubt he’ll ever play the song live. Still, the rawness of these feelings is covered up somewhat by the upbeat “Out of My System” that immediately succeeds it. Elsewhere, the subject of divorce is tackled from the child’s perspective with the catchy fuzz pop of “Everyone’s Stupid (In My Family)”.
Whether this will go down as an oddity in the man’s catalog or as one of the all-time classics of his solo career remains to be seen, but at the very least, if you buy the album and hate it, you won’t feel like you’ve squandered a lot of money. That, my friends, is a fine, fine feeling.
Highlight Track: For better or worse, the whole thing.