Come Feel Me Tremble (3/5 stars)

by CHRISTIAN HOARD [Rolling Stone Magazine[
(RS#936, November 2003)

As the feckless and wildly talented frontman of the Replacements, the finest indie-rock band of the Eighties, Paul Westerberg set the bar for his solo career awfully high, and his output since the band's 1991 demise has been shaky. Still, Come Feel Me Tremble caps an unusually productive eighteen-month run that found the forty-three-year-old Westerberg revisiting his raggedly tuneful bar-band sound of old. As on last year's double CD Stereo/Mono and this year's Dead Man Shake (released under the pseudonym Grandpaboy), the tunes here don't push your pleasure buttons quite like the old stuff. But "Knockin' 'Em Back" and "Wild and Lethal" are drinking-by-your-lonesome gems, and acoustic strummers such as "Crackle and Drag" and "Meet Me Down the Alley" represent some of the loveliest work of Westerberg's career. He may portray himself as a drunken wreck, but judging from Come Feel Me Tremble, Westerberg's neither down and out nor anywhere near finished as a songwriter.