Not for nothing did Paul Westerberg once don the name Grandpaboy -- he's proud to be a curmudgeon, sniping from the sidelines, holding onto his boozy rock and folk no matter what modern-day trends may be. Just because he doesn't follow trends doesn't mean he's oblivious to them, and his rush-recorded and rush-released 49:00 fits snugly into the digital Zeitgeist of 2008. Released on Amazon's MP3 store somewhere during the week of July 21, because they were the only digital retailer willing to accommodate Westerberg's price point of 49 cents, 49:00 is a 43-minute full-length presented as a single MP3 file with no names for its dozen or so songs, and no breaks between them either, forcing listeners to hear the whole thing as a piece. This seamless structure echoes fellow Minneapolis rocker Prince's decision to sequence initial pressings of Lovesexy as a single CD track, but 49:00 lends itself to an uninterrupted flow better than the Purple One's 1988 album, as it's a tapestry of partial tunes, melodic snippets, and complete songs, some seguing and some spliced together. Although there are enough full-blown songs to anchor this album, much of the music here wouldn't make sense on a proper album, as it floats in and out of focus, sometimes overlapping with an existing tune, sometimes offering just a tantalizing flash of melody or formative riff. But far from being a frustrating collection of unfinished home demos, 49:00 plays as a complete work, where the raggedness is part of the point -- and its coarse four-track surfaces feel defiant in an age of computer recording. There's undeniably an element of ragged rebellion in the rough-hewn creation of 49:00, but Westerberg has always sounded best when he's on the fringe -- and while this was delivered in a high-tech fashion, the album, with all its unfinished surfaces and frayed fragments, is old-fashioned college rock filled with fragile ballads, rude rock & roll, dead-end detours, and smart-ass jokes, like the classic rock oldies Westerberg flips through at the end of the album. Of all of Westerberg's solo albums, 49:00 comes closest to recapturing the spirit of the Replacements, but it doesn't do so by doggedly re-creating the 'Mats' drunken mess; instead, Westerberg reconnects to the joyous, reckless sense of adventure that fueled his earliest work, and by doing so his scruffiness is once again endearing and hard to resist.
--- - |- As some of you may have heard, earlier this week musical jesus Paul Westerberg released "49:00", an album that's almost 49 minutes of a musical collage, to be purchased digitally for only (...wait for it...) 49 cents. Insane right? I've never bought a song for that much, so to get an album's worth of gold is quite the deal.It's been about an hour since I got this, and now I am here l...
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Paul Westerberg's 49:00, a 43-minute one track album of stripped down rockers, disappeared from the Amazon mp3 charts, and Amazon itself this week. Last week, 49:00 was at the top of the site's mp3 album chart.Speculation on a Paul Westerberg fan web site (paulwesterberg.net) is that the release ran into copyright problems with a medley of covers near the end of the album. The covers included...
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Not necessarily "the best" of 2008 but these ended up in heavy rotation. I've included a single off the withdrawn 49:00 release by Paul Westerberg, which surfaced on Amazon for about a week this summer then got removed for reasons unknown. Most of these made up a birthday CD for Mogger StereoType. Happy New Year!Magick Ryan Adams & The Cardina Shining On Juliana HatfieldLights Out...
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Here is the first song -- there are no tracks -- on Paul's new 49:00 release -- which is available as a 49 cent download this week at Amazon. If these are throwaways, I can't wait until his next proper release. Great stuff -- more later.
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Here another "track" off the new Paul Westerberg release. This is a crunchy little number that is about a third of the way through this one track marvel. Cutting this up is hard, because there are some terrific snippets of songs crammed between each longer form tune. It starts with a bang. There are no song titles either, so I'm making them up -- and not being very creative as you'll see i...
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Do people still like to rock? The answer seems to be yes if they can get an entire album worth of songs for 49 cents. Paul Westerberg's stunt makes his new release the top album download at Amazon this week. Last week I posted two songs from this epic one track here on my MOG:http://mog.com/funoka/edit : Here's the list: 1. 49:00 by Paul Westerberg 2. Our Love To Admire by Interpol 3. M...
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The Paul Westerberg housecleaning continues. First he put 49:00 out on the curb to commemorate his 49th birthday, and now, a few scant weeks later, he's boxed up something called 3oclockreep (possibly to celebrate his kid going back to school?) over at TuneCore . Not too many details available at this time since I squandered my MOKB expense account on a Jonas Brothers Trapper Keeper for gra...
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After barely being released, Paul Westerberg's excellent 49:00 was pulled from the digital market last week. The reasons are somewhat unclear, but the almost universal understanding seems to be that it has to do with copyright issues - namely the medley of famous songs that Westerberg runs through toward the end of the album. [...]~~
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Perhaps Paul ought to drive a screwdriver through his hand more often. Not that having Westerberg out of commission for a year was a good thing, but ever since his accident, he has come roaring back with a creative vengeance. First the copyright infringin', vying for best post-Replacements album 49:00 was dropped on us, followed [...] ~~
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--- - |- As some of you may have heard, earlier this week musical jesus Paul Westerberg released "49:00", an album that's almost 49 minutes of a musical collage, to be purchased digitally for only (...wait for it...) 49 cents. Insane right? I've never bought a song for that much, so to get an album's worth of gold is quite the deal.It's been about an hour since I got this, and now I am here l...
More >
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