The Ramones
Weird Tales of the Ramones (4.5 stars)
The Ramones were never on the cover of Rolling Stone. The Ramones never had a top-10 hit. And of course, The Ramones never won a Grammy Award. That is a sad commentary on the audience, the media and the critics, because the Ramones are as great, as good, as righteous and as fun as any band ever was or ever will ever be.
The Ramones, of course, were the first punk band. But the Sex Pistols and Clash were only the first to be inspired by seeing them. To this day, their first four discs are a rite of passage for probably every member of every guitar-based band formed since, with Green Day, the White Stripes and U2 among the chart-toppers who pledge allegiance with a mighty gabba-gabba-hey.
So after decades of neglect, The Ramones have recently been the subject of numerous anthologies and hits collections. Weird Tales of the Ramones augments the familiar gathering of career-spanning music—three audio discs and a DVD video anthology—with a book of 25 comic artists playing with the band's cartoon punk image.
Bob Mould (3.5 stars)
Body of Song
It's not that Mould has ditched the synth-pop noodling that recently frustrated fans of his power chords, although that's what the hype about Body of Song being a "return to form" suggests. No, he's metabolized it. Part of his system, the electronica emerges in ways small (the vocoder opening to "I Am Vision, I Am Sound") and large (the danceable "Light Love Hope"). Allow me to commit heresy: It mostly works. The hints of groove add a welcome texture.
But there's plenty of returning to form, too, especially if you miss Mould's band, Sugar. "Missing You" is built from those same mighty, mighty buzz-tones. Ditto "Circles," even with its computerized opening.
While Mould is reliably unsunny—in the ballad "High Fidelity" he sings, "As I tumble down to the depths below / There's no flowers growing there," which sounds like a bummer to me—what's missing is his earlier raw, emotional edge: the coyote howl of, say, "Brasillia Crossed with Trenton." Here, "Underneath Days" is angry, but it's a broad anger; it lacks the distilled bitterness of a black gem like "Poison Years." That's fine. Some forms aren't worth returning to.
Tommy Lee (2.5 stars)
Tommyland: The Ride
The second solo album from Motley Crüe drummer/amateur porn star Tommy Lee thankfully excises all the techno and hip-hop influences of his 1999 side project, Methods of Mayhem, and whatever lingered on his 2002 solo debut. What's left is a relatively generic alt-rock mishmash that features guest spots by everyone from Nickelback's Chad Kroeger and Sum 41's Deryck Whibley to Backstreet Boy Nick Carter.
Given his band's newfound penchant for middle-of-the-road rock songs penned by pop-punkers, songs like "Sister Mary" (about a nun-turned-stripper) sound like they could easily have been at home on a new Motley Crüe record. Some, like the disturbingly self-referential "Tired" (on which Good Charlotte's Joel Madden sings, "Tommy got tired of Pamela"), sound like desperate bids for TRL success alongside the likes of Madden and Whibley.
Far more interesting than Lee's music is his never-ending self-obsession, which reaches its zenith (or nadir, depending on your level of tolerance) on the anti-paparazzi tirade "Tryin to Be Me." With a chorus that asks, "Who ever said it was painless / To try and be famous?" it's so blindingly out of touch with reality that there's no better way to sum up Lee's weird, unsettling appeal.