You know I get the feeling that Paul Westerberg has quietly retired from music. It would be a real shame if that’s the case, he’s a massively over-looked songwriter of particular skill both across his extensive solo catalogue and, most famously, with The Replacements.

Despite Westerberg’s songwriting chops and the band’s impact on their fans, many of whom would go on to form their own bands and achieve the level of success that eluded The Replacements during their initial run from 1979-1991. Many a pontification has already been made about why that break-through success always seemed, if you will, within their reach never occurred. Was it bad timing? Was it their own self-destructive tendencies?

It could be all of those things but more likely, as Westerberg would surmise in an interview to promote their temporary 2015 reunion and string of shows: “It was reprehensible some of the things they wanted us to do that were supposed to make our career bigger and ultimately make them the money. I swear to God we tried several times to get in line with that and we just couldn’t do it. Our personalities would not allow us to do that thing.”

That’s not to say that, toward the end, they didn’t try after all. Signed to Sire in 1985, their third record for the label Don’t Tell A Soul was a clear attempt at making The Replacments ‘hit’ – presumably at this point the execs were shouting louder than the fans. I’ve always had a lot of time for Don’t Tell A Soul – it contains some of their finest songs and is another clear jump in Westerberg’s songwriting evolution. For the first time they played it ‘straight’ across a whole album and there’s a notable shift toward more a mature take on subject matter.

The problem with Don’t Tell A Soul, though, wasn’t the songs. It lay in the sound. As per seemingly all their releases to date, The Replacements had…. issues with finding the right producer. In this case it was original producer Tony Berg being swapped out for Matt Wallace. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the record company decided to give the tapes to a chap called Chris Lord-Alge to mix. Chris, in his wisdom, decided to give The Replacements a cavernous, overly lacquered mix that swamped the songs in FM wash and robbed made them sound dated almost as soon as the album hit shelves.

If there were a prison for musical crimes, Chris Lord-Alge would still be serving time for his massacre of Don’t Tell A Soul‘s songs. While I’ve always had a soft spot for this album it’s always been hard to get past the poor mixing of great songs like, say, ‘Inherit The Earth’ (from which the album’s title is taken).

Thankfully, though, we no longer have to. The critical and, relative, commercial success of the Rhino release of For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s made that label release that there was still a love and hunger for archival Replacements material – Dead Man’s Pop arrived in 2019 and is a vital piece of the puzzle.

Yes, there’s the usual live recording and outtakes discs (pretty much everything recording during the Don’t Tell a Soul sessions including tracks with a visiting – and drunk – Tom Waits) that typically accompany such a release but what makes Dead Man’s Pop such a regular play for me is that it features the Matt Wallace mix of the album, restored as intended at the time and original sequencing.

With Lord-Alge’s studio bodging stripped from its songs, Don’t Tell a Soul becomes nothing short of a revelation for Replacements fans. It feels rawer and moodier than Pleased To Meet Me but its force places it close to Tim while the subject matter and streamlined songwriting clearly mark it as the work of a more mature band that are clearly pushing forward.

It still retains the ragged beauty that you’d associate with the band, if anything the removal of the studio glitter has revealed more that that. ‘Talent Show’ now begins with behind-the-scenes noise and the band chatting and laughing as they tune their equipment.

This human element, an earthier quality to the mix and sound, is on show throughout the album. The effect is that these songs suddenly sound more natural and organic compared to their previous incarnations, even to the point that the overtly FM-sounding songs like ‘Back to Back’ suddenly feel like they come from the same band that made ‘Bastards of Young’, just one that’s reaching for a higher place musically.

For me the version of Don’t Tell A Soul revealed as part of this box set has been highly addictive – even if it’s taken me so long to write about it. I’d never felt the songs got the attention or credit they deserved but thanks to this recasting the album has been removed from the mists of the late ’80s swamp and given a sound that no longer kneecaps some of their best songs. As bassist Tommy Stinson puts it: “maybe we’ll now sound like a band that stood the test of time.”

If you haven’t heard Don’t Tell A Soul in a while, or at all, do yourself a favour and wrap your lugholes around Dead Man’s Pop.