Paul Westerberg – Folker

Paul Westerberg really should just go ahead and make an album called Hamlet and get it over with. Going all the way back to the Replacements, Westerberg has spent his career obsessing over commitment issues involving loyalty, romance and fame. He rarely makes a declaration without some sort of qualifier, usually leaving himself a back-door out in the form of a punchline: “I’m in love with someone that doesn’t exist…as far as I know.”

Folker is very much of a piece with the rest of Westerberg’s catalogue, offering up further ruminations on his many moods of indecision. The music is unpolished and raw, with multi-tracked vocals layered to apply a strange, ghostly vibe. Several songs open with garbled tape noises where Westerberg couldn’t be bothered to edit out his count-ins. One imagines him leaning over to turn on the tape player between guitar strums, hustling to capture the moment.

Thematically, Folker has Westerberg’s customary wise-guy ragamuffin charm, even when he’s coming on like Charles Bukowski’s punk-rock offspring (“I’m your $100 groom/Promise not to leave the room/Even if I have to vomit”). The album also has a couple of arch bookends it would be better off without, the opening “Jingle (Buy It)” and closing “Folk Star”, which both seem more pointed than they should. Sour-grapes obsessing over fame and wealth is something he really should leave to Loudon Wainwright III, especially when Westerberg can be so much more interesting on other topics.

The unabashed love song “Looking Up In Heaven” actually finds Westerberg turning his back on paradise, mumbling that he was invited to stay, but “I told them there was another place I had to check out tonight.” Turns out he didn’t want to stay because the person he wants wasn’t up there. So Westerberg searches on down here, in love with someone that doesn’t exist — as far as he knows.