# 108 - The Replacements - Stink

I bought this on Saturday from the record and CD fair held in Oxford Town Hall, from the same guy, in fact, who sold me Let It Be (also by the Replacements, not the Beatles) about nine months ago. Briefly talking to him, I discovered that he's a fan of the band as well, so I was going to say that it's good that he stocks something relatively obscure for no other reason that he likes it and thinks other people should hear it, but it turns out Stink is available on Amazon and Play.com and probably on the high street too, so maybe it's not as unpopular as I thought it was and maybe he's not as rugged an individualist for carrying the Replacement's music. Still, he was an actual human being who feels the same way about a band as I do, so I'm a bit pissed off that I didn't have a longer conversation with him.

There isn't much on this CD that breaks out the punk paradigm enough to resemble anything like, say, Sixteen Blue from Let It Be, with the exception of one track; Go, which is like a very short classic rock song, but with the rough edges left on so that it might all the better snag your heart and pull along with it up into the sky. Bob Stinson's guitar sounds brilliant on this song and on others like Kid's Don't Follow (featuring an apparently real recording of the police dispersing reluctant partygoers), Stuck In The Middle and God Damn Job, especially since he is more to the foreground than multi-instrumentalist singer Paul Westerberg on this album, which is a pure guitar album (with the exception of the crucial addition of a harmonica to the crypto-blues of White And Lazy), than he would be on Let It Be. Westerberg, for his part, manages to display his vocal talents amply here, even when doing the shoutier vocals, which might conceal it.

Because of time restraints I chose to do Stink, which at about 15 minutes long some call an EP and some call a mini-LP, this week and to do the other, longer album I have to write up later. Being back at uni, I now no longer have the luxury of spending 7 hours half writing the blog and half watching stuff on tv-links.co.uk, so this was more of a concentrated 80 minute effort and I hope the brevity of it will be excused.