Paul Westerberg - 49:00

Tue 16th Sep, 2008 in Music Reviews

It seems very likely that years from now people will have forgotten about Paul Westerberg’s latest album 49:00. Not without reason too; a scant fortnight after the album dropped onto the Internet for the really-quite-affordable price of 49 cents, it disappeared without a trace (there has since then been a subsequent song released called 5:05 that refers directly to this event, but that’s a whole other story). And with a future re-release seeming rather unlikely due to the circumstances surrounding the disappearance it’s quite possible that a lot of people simply won’t get to hear this album at all.

Normally this wouldn’t be such a big problem. I love The Replacements; Let It Be and Tim are two of my all-time favourite albums and even All Shook Down has a lot of great moments. But ever since he started going solo Paul’s albums have had the tendency to obey a more-of-the-same mentality, where each release is good, certainly, but not a whole lot more than that. In short, a Paul Westerberg album always delivered exactly what you expected of it. Nothing less, nothing more. (The one exception being a bonus disc bundled with initial pressings of Stereo called Mono, under the moniker Grandpaboy. The style used on that album seems to be a direct influence on this latest work.)

So despite the interesting circumstances surrounding the album, I thought I was simply going to get a typically Paul album. And in a sense it is; despite being as old as my father Paul’s lyrics always sound like something you’d find in a teenager’s diary (That’s a good thing, for the record). But the presentation is unlike anything else I’ve heard in some time. Presented as one 44-minute long single track, 49:00 fades from one song to the other, some lasting minutes, some six seconds, and according to the man himself everything was recorded by himself in his bedroom.

Whatever though, right? Because all the trimmings in the world can’t change the quality of the songwriting. But what 49:00 has done for Paul is seemingly inspired him to write his best song cycle since All Shook Down. Stripped of his ties to any major label, he’s basically given himself free reign over his own songwriting, and you can honestly feel the sense of pride he takes in these songs. There’s a harsh sense of immediacy to tracks like Devil Raised A Good Boy (NOTE: I’m basically making up song titles here, because there are none) a song that matches its sneering vocals (“Flash like lightning/Burn like straw/Learned to live at night/Like a true outlaw”) with one of Paul’s best riffs in some time.

On Everyone’s Stupid, he shows he still has the ability to write about teenage dilemmas, this time detailing a boy who is the last person he knows who finds out his parents are getting divorced, the easy sing-song vocal rhythm lending the song an air of youthful abandon. And the album ends with a medley of tracks ranging from Born To Be Wild to I Think I Love You, the last track being a frenetic guitar-driven one that supposedly contains his own son singing along (If I have a son I hope he’s half as cool as this).

None of the tracks here are what you would call high quality recordings but tell me, isn’t anyone else out there tired of production that sucks the life out of the music? I love home-recorded music – rarely do studio productions produce a similar level of heart or emotion. And the sense of enjoyment present on this album makes it possibly the greatest modern flag-bearer for the DIY movement that we have at the moment.

Like I said, I can’t see 49:00 going down in the annals of history any time soon. And more than any album that has been released in an “unconventional” format (hello In Rainbows!), it deserves to. It’s nearing twenty years since The Replacements broke up, and I’d all but written Paul off as a has-been. I’m proud to say that I was completely and utterly mistaken.