2004-07-17 - 10:03 a.m. I remember once, on a pedantic turbo-geek music mailing list I used to belong to, a group of people were going on about Paul Westerberg and how unlistenable his solo albums were, etc., and that only die-hard Replacements fans, clinging to the memory of their greatness, could even tolerate his newest stuff. (Uh, for the record, I think my part of the debate was saying, "Hey, lay off--maybe he's not as great as he used to be, but he's not that bad...") And then a much younger member of the group said something to the effect of, "I never even heard the Replacements til after I heard his solo albums. I cut my teeth on 14 Songs, and to me, that's Paul Westerberg, and I love his music. And what I've heard of the Replacements really doesn't impress me. So there goes your theory that his solo suff is just for old, disappointed fans." All this is leading up to something. No, not just that Paul has a new record, but that I am really enjoying St. Anger. Having had no previous relationship with Metallica or their music, this just sounds very, very good to me. I can understand a lifelong Metallica-head not liking it, but if you're any fan of excellent guitar-playing, demonic singing, and unrelenting heaviness, you could do a lot worse. thoughts? (2 comments so far) previous - next blog archive contact