Grandpaboy.
Dead Man Shake.
Fat Possum Records.

In 1982, The Replacements, released one of the most bile-churning, cursing, coarse mini-albums of the punk rock and roll 80s, namely the release titled Stink, now, some 21 years after he played rhythm guitar, growled, whooped, produced and hopped about that recording, Paul Westerberg has turned in his second Grandpaboy album, Dead Man Shake. It probably makes a lot of sense that this Grandpaboy record is being released on Mississippian label, Fat Possum Records, home to such assorted bluesmen as R.L. Burnside, Hasil Adkins, The Neckbones, and more recently The Black Keys.
The album starts off with MPLS, which is a ragtime-blues shuffle. It’s a boozy paean to Westerberg’s hometown, Minneapolis. The guitars and drums hobble along and the whole thing sounds like Jerry Lee Lewis without the brandy glass full of amphetamines sitting on the piano. Do Right In Your Eyes is an acoustic blues about redemption, cautionary tales, and criticisms. It’s an emotive account and it completely suffuses the ghostly heritage of the blues that is being conjured on this record.
Vampires & Failures sounds like late 70s Roky Erikson, but while Erikson sounded almost childlike, he certainly wasn’t mellow, which in Vampires & Failures isn’t a bad thing. Halfway through the song, Westerberg pays a little tribute to Chubby Checker’s The Fly, by turning on something that sounds like an electric razor, and which never shuts up until the song is over.
The album heads home feverishly when Westerberg lays his mouth around I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams. The dreamy environment of the distorted rhythm guitar, the slide guitar that accompanies it, the drunken muffle of the drums and Westerberg’s plaintive repossession of lyrics such as ‘Did you ever see a robin weep when leaves begin to die? It's because he's lost the will to live’ really prove what Westerberg is trying to do with his Grandpaboy project, which is find solace in the musical history he has at his disposal. The title song, Dead Man Shake, is another uplifting rock and roll tune which fuses the garage-punk-gouge of The Replacements with the drop-dead scariness of Robert Johnson.
Dead Man Shake is an album full of grunting riffs, barn dancing, acoustic shanks, inebriated arse boogie and as Westerberg describes Grandpaboy himself “it seemed like the perfect extension of taking a lot of drugs and being wasted and swinging from chandeliers.’ Fat Possum Records and Paul Westerberg deliver …. again.