Westerberg Cleans Up His Act

By The Lizard King [Rocknet.com]
(1996)

I have never been a worshiper at the shrine of The Replacements, a band that was too often too drunk to play and whose best albums had a couple of great songs and lots of filler - and whose worst albums were unlistenable.

Paul Westerberg cleaned up his life after The Replacements disintegrated in the late '80s, and now has cleaned up his act. "Eventually" is a wonderful album, thematically coherent, musically fulfilling and perfectly produced by Westerberg himself.

The songs are almost always about a state of limbo, waiting for something that eventually will happen. Westerberg's lyrics describe the still point between one love affair and the next, or one phase of life and the next, and do so with both mournful ballads and uptempo semi-rockers.

And Westerberg avoids the trap of the alternative scene - that is, describing everything in cynical world-weary terms that leaves no place for hope. Though the line "a good day is any day that you're alive" isn't exactly Up with People material, it is a key to unlocking the positive spin hidden in most of these songs.

Eventually, everybody said Westerberg would put it all together and make the album that would realize the potential he showed in The Replacements. "Eventually," in fact, is that album - and it's one of the best of the year.