For those unfamiliar with The Replacements (known as The 'Mats by those in the know, which you now are), their most famous followers are the Goo Goo Dolls, who's more rocking tunes are derived almost directly from the 'Mats, though with a much more polished vocalist (at least on their well known songs).
Tim begins with "Hold My Life", which is one of a handful of tracks on the album that sounds like an outtake from Murmur (R.E.M.'s 1983 debut) with Paul Westerberg's weary wailing instead of Mike Stipe's incomprehensible mumble-singing and edgier, more distorted guitars.
The next track of real interest is "Kiss Me on the Bus", which is another track heavily influenced by R.E.M. However, this track also displays the naive childishness of their first album, Let It Be. That album contained such classics as "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" and "Gary's Got a Boner", but the closest they come to such sentiment is here, where Westerberg pleads that this girl kiss him on the bus home from school.
Although the Replacements have always had the image of the scrappy midwestern drunks throwing records together through sheer force of will (I remember when I first bought Tim, the clerk at CD World said that their music really dropped off when Westerberg got sober), they have always managed to write a track or two with real emotional impact, and this album features two stunners.
The first is "Bastards of Young", a hard rocking anthem about a generation without identity or place in the world. Think of it as the mid-80's post-punk equivalent of Richard Hell's "Blank Generation". The chorus almost sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of drunks in a bar, screaming at the top of their lungs with their own version of punk's nihilistic,
"no-future" vision.
The second is the song from which this blog gets a name. Starting with R.E.M. in the early 1980s, a new radio format really came in to its own, and that was college radio. With conventional radio becoming slave to the pocket of the major labels and their increasingly safe, commercial output, college radio became the primary outlet for new, interesting bands. These stations broadcast at lower frequencies than normal stations, and were thus "Left of the Dial".
This is not to discount the album's other brilliant tracks, most notably album closer "Here Comes a Regular," a moving portrait of a life being wasted away in a small town bar. Musically, this songs sounds like it belonged on Big Star's dying opus Third/Sister Lovers. The influence of Alex Chilton on the band was confirmed when The 'Mats penned a tribute to him on their next album.
Elsewhere there are punk screechers about cultural conformity (the New York Dolls-ish punk boogie "I'll Buy") and drugs ("Dose of Thunder"), as well as a lighter ditty about how flight attendants think they're so great, but they're no more than a "Waitress in the Sky".
5 Stars (out of 5)
