The Replacements: Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? (Sire/Reprise/Rhino)

For my nickel, the Replacements are the greatest American band of the last 25 years. And, to quote a once-scruffy Buffalo trio who stole every move in the Replacements' playbook, “I ain’t the only one.” Bands like Soul Asylum, Nirvana, Wilco, Superchunk and (of course) the Goo Goo Dolls each show a heavy influence and owe a debt to the Minneapolis quartet, while generations of rock critics, who fell over themselves to praise the band since it first appeared in 1981, continue to celebrate their music and what it represents long after the band’s demise. Sure, the Mats (as the band will be forever be known to admirers, fanatics and scholars of underground rock) have a pack of perfect songs strewn with powerful hooks and nimbly scale the human scope, capturing immature fun and jest, vigor and vitriol, heartache, loss and plenty of self-doubt. But there’s more to it. The band’s music has retained an unfettered purity for 15 years since frontman Paul Westerberg dissolved them. The legend of their inebriated power trash pop and unkempt bash and punk looms large for believers in the great rock-and-roll ideal. The Mats never achieved the arena-packing success that was supposed to be theirs for the taking, and that is part of their enduring shine: They remained the outsider losers that they supposed themselves to be. It was never just posture for the Replacements, either. They really were, more or less, a bunch of booze-sodden knuckleheads from Minnesota with nothing better to do than play in a band and make records with their hearts on their sleeves. In a music marketplace that has become more and more a “music industry,” the Replacements remain the heroes who refused to follow the rules, split while they were still relevant and just happened to leave behind a good-fuckin’-lookin' corpse in the form of their collection of songs. That legacy is here suspended in 18 of the band’s finest moments. For the first time both the Twin Tone Records and Sire eras are collected side by side, plus two newly recorded tracks by the surviving, reconvened core of the band. There’s not a wasted track on Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?, starting from the glory of the band’s early years, like the unbridled attack of “Shiftless When Idle,” to Westerberg’s pensive one-man band on “Within Your Reach.” The band’s middle period, which arguably proved to be their finest, is represented by two from the album Tim, with the “displaced generation” punk epic “Bastards of Young” and the masterful love muse (written to both the girl who got away and to rock and roll itself) “Left of the Dial,” as well as a few from Pleased to Meet Me (“Alex Chilton,” “Skyway," “Can’t Hardly Wait”). Of the new tracks, “Message to the Boys” solidly recreates the band’s balanced blister and bittersweetness; it's less like a “we’re back” reunion and more of a hearty goodbye wave. “Best of” just doesn’t get any better than this.