This is a brilliant rock & roll album: as loose as it is deliberate, as pretty as it is hard rocking and as pissed off at all the right things ("Seen Your Video," "Androgynous") as it is hilarious ("Gary's Got a Boner").
Paul Westerberg – the Replacements' lead singer, songwriter and principal guitarist on Let It Be – writes about funny little things, like "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out," then fills the songs with anger, frustration and excitement. His voice is great – so desperate when he sings, "How do you say I'm lonely to an answering machine," so sympathetic when he sings, "Your age is the hardest age; everything drags and drags." In "Androgynous," Westerberg
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seems to find shortcomings in the whole lot of males in his generation: "Don't get him wrong/Don't get him mad/He might be a father, but he sure ain't a dad," he sings sadly. And in the heavy rocker "Favorite Thing," with the other members of the Replacements pounding behind him, he screams like an incensed Joe Strummer.
Whereas most of the songs on the group's first two albums, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash and Hootenanny, were speeding, hard-driven rock, there's an amazing range to Let It Be. Westerberg works out his many different ideas by occasionally augmenting the band – which is almost invariably awful live – with friends like R.E.M.'s Peter Buck on guitar and the Suburbs' Chan Poling on piano. He leads into "Unsatisfied" with a gorgeous solo on twelve-string acoustic guitar, then tears out your heart singing, "Everything goes or anything goes/All of the time/Everything you dream of is right in front of you/Liberty is a lie." Of course, he's not the first rocker who wanted satisfaction and couldn't get any, but in an age when most rock records are studied and wimpy, this rugged album feels truly fresh. (RS 441)
DEBBY MILLER
The 'Mats first classic album balances ramshackle, juvenile punkiness with Paul Westerberg's quickly blossoming songwriting talents. "I Will Dare," "Androgynous" and "Unsatisfied" all became fan favorites by turning fragile, private emotions into outward expressions of confusion and need. And they'd get even better than this!
The Replacements'
Let It Be is one of the most lovable albums ever to come out of the American garage: a shabbily tuneful bash-and-pop masterpiece about youthful uncertainty, androgyny and getting your tonsils out, complete with a Kiss cover and a Ted Nugent-indebted barnburner called "Gary's Got a Boner."
Released in 1984, Let It Be was one of the high points of the get-in-the-van Eighties indie-rock scene, but these well-soused Minnesotans had no use for the principles or oblique artiness of contemporary bands such as Sonic Youth or Husker Du. Instead, frontman Paul Westerberg crammed the equivalent of a half-dozen John Hughes films into thirty-three brilliant minutes, claiming Springsteenian passion and regular-dude earnestness for overgrown kids trapped in the Midwest.
Let It Be brilliantly mixes up recklessness and vulnerability: The opening one-two punch of "I Will Dare" and "Favorite Thing" have just the right amounts of smartass sneering and undeniable melody. But the real surprise is a series of bighearted ballads -- the everything-sucks lament "Sixteen Blue," the gorgeous, trend-monitoring "Androgynous" and "Unsatisfied," a slice of adolescent agony that stands as the best song Westerberg has ever written. Few albums so brilliantly evoke the travails of growing up, and even fewer have so perfectly captured a young band in all its ragged glory.
