75% Less Fat (4/5 stars)

By Al Weisel [Rolling Stone Magazine]
( #657, 1993)

Former Replacements drummer Chris Mars has a chip on his shoulder that's as big as his talent. Mars wrote all the songs and plays almost every instrument on 75% Less Fat (as he did on his 1992 debut, Horseshoes and Handgrenades), and he makes damn well sure you know it. But it's easy to see why he tries so hard to prove himself. After all, drummers are usually dismissed as the most expendable of rock instrumentalists, a notion that was exploited hilariously in This Is Spinal Tap. Then there's the burden of having been a member of the band that was supposed to save rock & roll now that it's been replaced by another flannel-sporting group teetering on the edge of destruction.

But Mars is not sentimental about the old days. The album's title is a sly allusion to the other three fourths of the Replacements, but it also describes the lean, no-frills music that's inside. On "Stuck in Rewind," the driving cut that opens the record, the thirty-year-old Mars makes it clear that he's not quite ready to book a room in that rock retirement home being built in Lenox, Massachusetts. "Age is no death sentence," he declares. "Keep the past where it belongs/The future is alive." In "All Figured Out" he reflects on how unpredictable that future can be: "Don't be stupid enough to think your whole life's planned out," Mars growls, perhaps addressing his younger self. "Look at your crystal ball upon the dash/Does it give you confidence you'll never crash?"

Most of Less Fat doesn't stray far from three-minute, three-chord pop formula, and a few of the high-school novelties sound strained. But "Demolition," a bluesy, elegiac ode written from the point of view of the head of a wrecking crew, reveals an unexpected depth that recalls some of the Replacements' most harrowing paeans to self-destruction. Mars is eerily convincing as someone who is both a willing participant and an aloof witness to the collapse of "a structure that once seemed so strong." He seems to have pulled himself from the wreckage of his old band and reinvented himself none the worse for the wear.