Ramones: Road to Ruin

Road to Ruin

Best song: most of them, but I’ll stick with the obvious answer of I Wanna Be Sedated

Worst song: She’s the One

Overall grade: 6

The Ramones’ fourth album is both very familiar and very new. It gets off to an unsurprising start with the fast, energetic guitar riff of ‘I Just Want To Have Something To Do’, and it’s not until Joey starts singing that you realise quite how much development there has been since the last album. With Tommy Ramone out of the drummer’s chair (replaced by some guy called Marky, who sounds pretty similar) and now behind the scenes producing, things just sound different – the melody is emphasised more, and the anger, while still ever-present, has become more subtle. It’s really working for them. They never move into any kind of sickly-sweet pop; the guitar is too animalistic for that and the vocals too hard around the edges, but every song overflows with hooks and giant sing-along choruses. And while the record as a whole still gets samey in places, when a song gets stuck in your head (and it will) you’ll know exactly which one it is.

Songs such as ‘I Don’t Want You’ prove they’re finally taking this music business thing seriously. It doesn’t have many lyrics, but the delivery is a thousand times more sincere than anything on previous records. And a couple of the songs, like ‘I Wanted Everything’, break the three minute mark! That’s how you know they mean business.

The group seem more willing to experiment with ideas now, and there’s a slight country influence on ‘Don’t Come Close’, a great song which feels like something that would be played over the closing credits of a film. The influence is there too on ‘Questioningly’, but that track is more notable for being the band’s attempt at a solemn, honest love song. It’s the biggest surprise of the album in that it’s actually very successful! The slowed-down playing doesn’t lose any of the life that the faster numbers have, and the lyrics are good even though they’re frank and not hidden behind their usual veil of humour.

Further showing how these guys are moving on is ‘I’m Against It’. It almost seems like, dare I say it, a purposeful self-parody, taking the nihilism that defines punk and using it in such an extreme way that it becomes comical. I like how they’re not afraid to laugh at themselves and that they’re not trying to distance themselves from the whole punk scene, and I like the song too, especially Joey’s super-intense growling of the lyrics.

‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ has become one of the band’s best-known songs, despite originally being released as a b-side. Again, the fact that it’s based on a true story (Joey Ramone struggling to cope with the Ramones’ frantic touring) gives it more gravity, but the subject matter never tries to overwhelm the song, which stays fun all the way through.

The downside to the band’s new maturity is that the throwaway material is much easier to spot – ‘She’s the One’ is a blatant piece of filler that would have fit in better on one of the previous records, but still would have been one of the weaker tracks. And then ‘Needles and Pins’ is an acceptable cover, but just when their own songs are getting so awesome, I’m not sure it’s really needed.

But apart from those two, there’s nothing to bring this album down, unless you’re one of those people who believes that taking the music in this direction was the Ramones ‘selling out’. It’s not. This is the exact opposite of selling out! (I’m not sure what that is, though… pretty sure ‘selling in’ is not a term) This is the band becoming more artistically creative, more willing to experiment, and if it happened to sell them a few records, well, so much the better. I can’t see why old-time fans who are devoted to the first three albums dismiss this one when it has songs like ‘Bad Brain’ on it, something which takes the best elements of the early records and makes them better, or ‘I Just Want To Have Something To Do’ which is basically just a more technically interesting version of their past stuff.

This wasn’t the first Ramones album I heard, but it was the one that made me see what all the fuss was about when it comes to them, and I still see it as their absolute high point of studio output – the moment when their punk and pop worlds collided in a glorious explosion.