Rhino Records completes its reissue of the Replacements catalogue with the four albums recorded for Sire: Tim, Pleased to Meet Me, Don’t Tell a Soul and All Shook Down. The liner notes in the albums make it clear that the band may have had the songs to be big, but they didn’t have the personal makeup to survive the spotlight. The notes to Don’t Tell a Soul recall the moment when Paul Westerberg watched Tom Petty while the Replacements were on tour opening for him and realized that he couldn’t do what Petty was doing, singing the same songs the same way nightly and making a huge crowd happy in the process. The notes for that album confirm that they all realized on that tour that the band’s days were numbered.

Actually, the Sire albums are the sound of a band coming apart. After all the promise of Tim, parts of the car started rattling loose, and by the time of All Shook Down, the Westerberg demos included on the disc confirm that the album was virtually a solo album as the band arrangements closely mirror his.

At the time, no one I knew could stand the album, bumming because there was no fastball, no “Bastards of Young,” and no “Black Diamond” wiseass moment. Now, detached from any sense of expectation, the album is a fine indie rock record with modest pop songs that pay off consistently. Westerberg’s songcraft was so finely honed that clever lyrics were rarely showily so, and if he could toe up to the line of preciousness on “Sadly Beautiful,” he was more credibly vulnerable than his peers, so he gets some slack. The space in “One Wink at a Time” and “Someone Take the Wheel” recalls “I Will Dare” and allows him to sing with a human sense of scale.

Now, the album also sounds like a band finding a way to exist that was truer to them. Temperamentally unsuited to the big time, they retreated from it, but when grunge was starting to hit, being louder and sloppier wasn’t a move to more personal space. Instead, they returned to the garage and sketched out songs and produced arguably their most consistent album—along with Pleased to Meet Me—of their career.