THE REPLACEMENTS

Dead Man’s Pop RHINO

7/10

IF ever an album was a fixer-upper, it’s The Replacements’ 1989 Don’t Tell A Soul. With a recording process that was chaotic and self-destructive even by the Minnesota quartet’s peerless standards, a firestorm of external and internal band pressures, and sky-high expectations after their peak Let It Be/Tim/ Pleased To Meet Me run, the album was primed to fail.

So Dead Man’s Pop, the working title for Don’t Tell A Soul, is the rarer form of deluxe-edition boxset, not an obsessive documentation of a treasured work, but a reclamation project. Presenting essentially two new versions of the record, in addition to a live show and bonus tracks from the period, it argues that a few tweaks can rewrite the historical place of The Replacements’ sixth record from the start of their decline to a last gasp of their ’80s college-rock dominance.

At the time, Don’t Tell A Soul set its sights even higher, as the Warner Brothers executive suite felt they were ready to graduate to mainstream success. With frontman Paul Westerberg finally