In a move that happened too fast for most online music news sources to notice, Paul Westerberg released a new, online-only album today, 49:00, for only 49 cents.

Follow the relevant link on the fan site Man Without Ties for the details. At this point, it’s available from Amazon.com and something called Tunecore.com, apparently the only sites that would agree to the 49-cents thing.

Of course, with Westerberg there’s a catch. You get all the songs in one big MP3 file, and no indication of song titles. (Although another fan site made pretty good guesses.)

There’s plenty of other curve balls. Firstly, it’s only 43:55 minutes. 49:00 at times sounds a bit like an old TDK blank tape he saw fit to cram with as many songs and scraps as he could on one side. Some songs begin just before the prior ones abruptly end. Occasional six-second splurges of unrelated songs bridge one “proper” song to the next. You might think this is Westerberg being lazy, but I don’t.

Like everything he’s released this decade, except the Open Season soundtrack, this album is a one-man-band-in-his-basement affair. When he first unveiled this new direction, on 2002’s awesome Stereo/Mono, he seemed to hit upon way to treat lo-fi as a sonic value. It’s as if he realized he could get a better, more unique sound on his own, with rudimentary engineering skills. Rather than hire a bunch of session hands to try and fail to re-create, say, the classic Stones sound, he himself tried and failed to re-create the classic Stones sound. In the process, he found a cool sound all his own.

Based on one listen, 49:00 could be the next step for Westerberg’s evolving aesthetic. The album functions equally well as an endearingly sloppy take on Let it Bleed and Gasoline Alley, or a musique concrete deconstruction of itself.

My take on Westerberg, which has no basis in any real interaction with the man, is that he’s a lot like Neil Young: A curmudgeonly control-freak perfectionist who wants, no demands, that things sound messy. He wants that off-the-cuff one-take vibe, and has little or no compunction about dropping your ass if you can’t supply it. I’ll admit, it can provide a listener with a severe case of cognitive dissonance at times. But it also allows him to tap into that devil-may-care, funny streak that made The Replacements so endearing to a lot of people.

It ain’t Loser Rock, that’s for damn sure!