Pleased to Meet Me [180-Gram Vinyl LP] in Bloomington, MN

All things considered,
Tim
was an easy transition to the majors for
the Replacements
, at least as far as the making of the album goes: things went wrong after the release, as the band botched big showcases like its Saturday Night Live spot, leading up to the dismissal of
Bob Stinson
at the conclusion of the
tour. The dust hadn't settled when
the 'Mats
headed down to Memphis to record
Pleased to Meet Me
with producer
Jim Dickinson
at Ardent Studios -- or to phrase it in
Alex Chilton
-speak, to record with
Big Star
's
3rd
producer at the studio where all three
albums were made. All this fanboy worship perhaps naturally led to a full-blown mash note to
Paul Westerberg
's idol, who also turned up to play a couple of licks on a finally finished "Can't Hardly Wait," which initially was attempted with
Chilton
as a producer before
, but
didn't resemble either the crystalline pop of
#1 Record
or the narcissistic black hole of
.
Dickinson
gave
a full-blooded, muscular production, cranking up guitars, hauling out an upright bass for
Tommy Stinson
, and bringing in horns -- even strings -- to flesh out
Westerberg
's songs. This was
as professionals and, ever the contrarians, they strained against it -- albeit only sporadically and underneath the surface -- with
's outsider stance calcifying into the invigorating bitterness of "I.O.U." and "I Don't Know." These two proto-slacker anti-anthems -- quite the inverse of the call to arms of "Bastards of Young" and "Left of the Dial" -- are the only times the group's self-sabotage surfaces here, as the bandmembers pretty much give themselves over to
's studio savvy, leading to the ominous pulse of "The Ledge" and the brilliant, shining power pop of "Never Mind," "Alex Chilton," and "Valentine," along with such left-field twists as the mock jazz of "Nightclub Jitters."
This kind of colorful, almost cinematic production -- even the greasy rocker "Shooting Dirty Pool" is enhanced by the sound of breaking glass -- was unheard of on a
Replacements
record and it all came to a head on "Can't Hardly Wait," which was glossed over with swelling strings and
the Memphis Horns
. All these fancy accoutrements would seem like the antithesis of
' spirit, but
's grand production merely blows
up to epic scale, leaving their essence intact:
even gets a lovely fragile acoustic moment in "Skyway" and there are down-and-dirty rockers like "Shooting Dirty Pool" and "Red Red Wine" that feel like throwaways, but are necessary to the spirit of the record.
The Replacements
never sounded better with a bigger production than they did on
, so it's hard not to see it as the one that got away, the record that should have been the breakthrough, especially in the year when fellow American underground rockers
R.E.M.
leaped into the Top Ten (but, it's also true that "The Ledge" may not have been the best single choice, as songs about suicides don't often provide entry into the Top 40). Then again,
don't make sense as a success story, so the failure of the gleaming, glistening
winds up making its polish kind of heart-rending. As it turns out, this was the last time they could still shoot for the stars and seem like their scrappy selves and, in many ways, it was the last true
album. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine