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Besterberg: Best of Paul Westerberg [Amazon]

Read the lyrics and look for the literary devices in the song.

Few icons of the mid-'80s college-rock heyday had more to live up to than Replacements singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg. Even if his rowdy Minneapolis band mates heard Aerosmith in their heads, he wrote songs to rival the subtle Big Star classics of his power-pop hero, Alex Chilton. Westerberg was the raggedly
eloquent [clear and effective in speaking] , pre-Kurt Cobain voice of volatility, as sensitive to emotional frustration as he was to voluminous excess.

Ornery and reclusive, Westerberg has side-stepped his legacy. His 1993 solo debut, "14 Songs," held a few charms, although it was the gloriously rock'n'roll tour on its behalf that seemed to offer real promise. Yet Westerberg soon retreated to his basement, moaning about cloth-eared record executives and carbon copies of his sound. Where the post-punk bard once wrote songs of searing passion and cutting humor, he now seemed to see his "mature" artistic path as one of tasteful, tepid [lukewarm] folk-pop.

As imperfect as Westerberg's solo career, the woefully titled, 20-track "Besterberg" at least plucks some gems from his post-Replacements dross. Prime among these are from "14 Songs": the combustible, cautionary rocker "World Class Fad" (Westerberg being sympathetic to Cobain's plight) and the throat-tightening break-up lament "Things" ("Things I'm bound to tell you/Like that dress looks great on you"). But that first album also presaged future mediocrity, as with the ballad by-numbers "Runaway Wind."

Among its rarities, "Besterberg" includes a clutch [a group] of songs Westerberg penned for soundtracks, both memorable (the stirring romantic-fool rave-up "Stain Yer Blood," from "Friends") and best forgotten (the Monkees-like "Dyslexic Heart" from "Singles," a dreary cover of the Beatles' "Nowhere Man" from "I Am Sam"). Some of the b-sides here are merely tossed-off, although the previously unissued track "C'Mon C'Mon C'Mon" is fun in a rolling'n'tumbling, Replacements-lite kind of way.

Source: Star-Ledger.