This expanded Let It Bleed edition of the Replacements' fourth studio album Tim—the final with their full, original lineup—is a marvelous, absolutely necessary corrective to the muddled-sounding original release from 1985. Tim found the band at their creative peak, with some of the best songs Paul Westerberg, Chris Mars, and brothers Tommy and Bob Stinson would ever write, fresh under their belts. Here we get to enjoy not only the demos and an entire live show that are staples of the expanded reissue game, but we get to hear a version of the original album that's worthy of the material, thanks to veteran producer and engineer Ed Stasium.The Replacements really were contenders, and it's easy to imagine they could at least have been as big as Tom Petty, if not Springsteen. In 1985, they were newly signed to a supportive label with major distribution (Sire, who had championed the Ramones and Talking Heads). And the songs! From the deadpan, self-effacing yet somehow swaggering opener "Hold My Life" to the delightful Big Star redux of "Kiss Me On The Bus," the wallflower anthem "Swingin Party," the anthemic as fuck "Bastards Of Young," the incredible college radio ass-kiss of "Left Of The Dial," and then ending with the absolute heartbreaker of "Here Comes A Regular," Tim had every right to be as good or better than their gleeful breakout 1984 album Let it Be. A Ramone (Tommy a.k.a Tom Erdelyi) was even brought in to produce the thing, after initial sessions with their hero Alex Chilton (excerpts of which are included here). The mix just never came together, and the band did not have the creative control they'd previously had under Twin/Tone Records.In those pre-Nevermind days, there were very few acts who'd made the transition from the supportive yet broke-as-heck indie label system to a major label with sonic integrity intact. R.E.M. didn't succeed at the task until 1988, and even the Replacements' longtime friends Hüsker Dü failed spectacularly in 1987 with the messy, uninspired Warehouse. Tim sounded flat and a bit strange to fans, in a manner likely similar to Detroiters first hearing the second MC5 album, or Bowie's mix of the Stooges' Raw Power. So much information seemed to be missing. The 'Mats fans watched the notoriously sloppy yet inventive band morph from jokey hardcore kids to serious contenders for the next great troubadours in the vein of the Band. To mainstream reviewers, it was a fresh blast, on the strength of the group's erratic, epic live shows and how great these songs are. In November 1985, Rolling Stone crowed that the album sounded "as if it were made by the last real band in the world." Unfortunately, the self-destruction and excess that seemed cute at first took its toll, and guitarist Bob Stinson would be asked to leave before they could record the followup, 1987's Pleased to Meet Me. Stinson died a decade later.The producers of this reissue deserve all the medals and awards for their painstaking and sonically dense paean to, resurrection of, and love letter for the Replacements' fourth studio album. The band would doubtless have still managed to fuck their career up even if the initial product had sounded this good. The released video for "Bastards" is, of course, the ultimate slacker moment: A single camera shot of a stereo playing the song, the focus pulled back to reveal a smoking male listening to it on a couch, who then kicks in the speakers when it's over. Today, we have the version of the song that should have soundtracked it. Almost forty years too late, but we have it. © Mike McGonigal/Qobuz

Hearing Queens of the Stone Age's long out of print debut many years after its initial 1998 release does pack the shock of revelation: Josh Homme’s tightly wound blueprint for QOTSA was in place from the very beginning. Where Homme’s previous outfit, Kyuss, were all about expansion, Queens of the Stone Age were about compression, Homme stripping stoner rock to its essence -- riffs as heavy as granite, solos as spacy as the desert sky. The songs on Queens of the Stone Age are shorter, pulled into focus by grinding fuzz riffs that anchor the proceedings even when the instrumental sections begin to drift into the ether. Another distinguishing factor in Queens of the Stone Age is that Homme writes full-blown songs -- pushing their two best songs, “Regular John” and “Avon,” to the front, giving them room to float later on -- so the album isn’t just about instrumental interaction, but the crucial difference is that this isn’t music solely for disaffected males. There is sex and swagger to Queens of the Stone Age, there’s a swing to the rhythms, there’s a darkly enveloping carnal menace buttressed by muscle and lust that keeps the album from being an insular stoner headpiece. Certainly, there’s enough sinewy force to suggest the mighty brawn of Rated R and Songs for the Deaf; Homme retained enough of the desert spaciness of Kyuss to give Queens of the Stone Age an otherworldly shimmer, a hazy quality he later abandoned for aggressive precision, so this winds up as a unique record in his catalog, a place where you can hear Homme’s past and future intertwining.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Moving to a major label was inevitable for the Replacements: they garnered too much acclaim and attention after Let It Be to stay on Twin/Tone, especially as the label faced the same distribution problems that plagued many indies in the mid-'80s -- plus, the 'Mats' crosstown rivals, Hüsker Dü, made the leap to the big leagues, paving the way for their own hop over to Sire. The Replacements may have left Twin/Tone behind but they weren't quite ready to leave Minneapolis in the dust, choosing to record in their hometown with Tommy Erdelyi -- aka Tommy Ramone -- who gives the 'Mats a big, roomy sound without quite giving them gloss; compared to Let It Be, Tim is polished, but compared to many American underground rock records of the mid-'80s (including those by the Ramones), it's loose and kinetic. The production -- guitars that gained muscle, drums and vocals that gained reverb -- is the biggest surface difference, but there aren't just changes in how the Replacements sound; what they're playing is different too, as Paul Westerberg begins to turn into a self-aware songwriter. A large part of the charm of Let It Be was how it split almost evenly between ragged vulgarity and open-hearted rockers, with Westerberg's best songs betraying a startling, beguiling lack of affect. That's not quite the case with Tim, as Westerberg consciously writes alienation anthems: the rallying cry of "Bastards of Young" and the college radio love letter "Left of the Dial," songs written with a larger audience in mind -- not a popular audience, but a collection of misfits across the nation, who huddled around Westerberg's raw, twitchy loneliness on "Swingin Party" and "Here Comes a Regular," or the urgent and directionless "Hold My Life." These songs are Westerberg at his confessional peak, but instead of undercutting this ragged emotion or hiding it away, as he did on the Twin/Tone albums, he pairs it with the exuberance of "Kiss Me on the Bus" -- an adolescent cousin to "I Will Dare" -- and channels his smart-ass comments into the terrifically cynical rockabilly shuffle "Waitress in the Sky." All this eats up so much oxygen that there's not much air left for any of the recklessness of the Twin/Tone LPs: there's no stumbling, no throwaway jokes, with even the twin rave-ups of "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown" straightened out, no matter how much Bob Stinson might try to pull them apart, which is perhaps the greatest indication that the Replacements were no longer the band they were just a couple years ago. Some 'Mats fans never got over this change, but something was gained in this loss: the Replacements turned into a deeper band on Tim, one that spoke, sometimes mumbled, to the hearts of losers and outcasts who lived their lives on the fringe. If Let It Be captured the spirit of the Replacements, then Tim captured their soul.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Moving to a major label was inevitable for the Replacements: they garnered too much acclaim and attention after Let It Be to stay on Twin/Tone, especially as the label faced the same distribution problems that plagued many indies in the mid-'80s -- plus, the 'Mats' crosstown rivals, Hüsker Dü, made the leap to the big leagues, paving the way for their own hop over to Sire. The Replacements may have left Twin/Tone behind but they weren't quite ready to leave Minneapolis in the dust, choosing to record in their hometown with Tommy Erdelyi -- aka Tommy Ramone -- who gives the 'Mats a big, roomy sound without quite giving them gloss; compared to Let It Be, Tim is polished, but compared to many American underground rock records of the mid-'80s (including those by the Ramones), it's loose and kinetic. The production -- guitars that gained muscle, drums and vocals that gained reverb -- is the biggest surface difference, but there aren't just changes in how the Replacements sound; what they're playing is different too, as Paul Westerberg begins to turn into a self-aware songwriter. A large part of the charm of Let It Be was how it split almost evenly between ragged vulgarity and open-hearted rockers, with Westerberg's best songs betraying a startling, beguiling lack of affect. That's not quite the case with Tim, as Westerberg consciously writes alienation anthems: the rallying cry of "Bastards of Young" and the college radio love letter "Left of the Dial," songs written with a larger audience in mind -- not a popular audience, but a collection of misfits across the nation, who huddled around Westerberg's raw, twitchy loneliness on "Swingin Party" and "Here Comes a Regular," or the urgent and directionless "Hold My Life." These songs are Westerberg at his confessional peak, but instead of undercutting this ragged emotion or hiding it away, as he did on the Twin/Tone albums, he pairs it with the exuberance of "Kiss Me on the Bus" -- an adolescent cousin to "I Will Dare" -- and channels his smart-ass comments into the terrifically cynical rockabilly shuffle "Waitress in the Sky." All this eats up so much oxygen that there's not much air left for any of the recklessness of the Twin/Tone LPs: there's no stumbling, no throwaway jokes, with even the twin rave-ups of "Dose of Thunder" and "Lay It Down Clown" straightened out, no matter how much Bob Stinson might try to pull them apart, which is perhaps the greatest indication that the Replacements were no longer the band they were just a couple years ago. Some 'Mats fans never got over this change, but something was gained in this loss: the Replacements turned into a deeper band on Tim, one that spoke, sometimes mumbled, to the hearts of losers and outcasts who lived their lives on the fringe. If Let It Be captured the spirit of the Replacements, then Tim captured their soul.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo