Sorry Ma! Forgot to Take Out the Trash!

No album has ever captured the reckless abandon of the teenage experience as well as the Replacements’ debut, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash. If you’ve ever spent an evening in the backseat of a friend’s vehicle bouncing from convenience store to basement bedroom to backwoods beer bust fuelled by nothing but cigarettes, loud music, and the love of your dead-end high school pals, then you will recognize some part of yourself in the commotion of Sorry Ma. The album moves at such an overdriven whiplash pace that it’s hard not to feel like you are back in some buddy’s busted Trans Am as it takes the turns of a 25 mph suburban road at 65 mph, smashing mailboxes and tipping garbage cans at every corner. Many songwriters have attempted to translate the adolescent experience in solemn, lonely room desolation; the triumph of Sorry Ma is that it releases all the pent-up frustration, energy, and boredom in an unbridled exorcism that is never less than joyful. Some people celebrate when the screaming’s over; for the ‘Mats, the screaming was the celebration. And even in its most reckless, tuneless moments, Sorry Ma retains the bittersweet sensibility that separated this Minneapolis foursome from millions of similar-minded bands.