LISTING IS FOR BOTH. RAMONES TOO TOUGH TO DIE VINYL NEW! LIMITED 40TH ANNIVERSARY BLUE 180 GRAM LP! The Ramones’ Too Tough To Die is often positioned as a return to form for the band, but today, forty years since its release, their eighth studio album seems worthy of a far more radical categorization. In the musical landscape of the mid-1980s, the album was incoherent – not in a pejorative sense, but in how it reflected the paradoxes of its time. Made without a steady compass, the album’s incongruity became its center, and it holds. As Joey Ramone said in a 1988 interview: Around’84, the world was changing drastically with Iran and Gadaffi and all this stuff. Things were getting scary. So, our songs started changing. Echoing the surrounding instability, the Ramones created an album so layered, complex, and challenging that it can still be hard to pin down, even after four decades to ponder its songs. Too Tough To Die’s legacy lives in its chameleon-like textures, moods, and vocal styles – from the lofty to the sneering, from the cynical to the sentimental. Too Tough to Die was a reminder that it was the Ramones who initially inspired and influenced the Sex Pistols, not. RAMONES ROCKET TO RUSSIA VINYL NEW! LE PINK 180 GRAM LP! Released in November 1977, just a little more than a year after their debut album, the Ramones’ Rocket To Russia is a testament to the very thing art is not supposed to do: stay the same. In fact, their persona, let alone their first three albums, suggests practically zero progress at all – and that’s the point. Rinse and repeat, at best. Even with producers whose sonic vision varied greatly, their albums churn the same cauldron of loud and fast with perfectly sequenced “slow” songs that make the fast ones seem even faster. The album landed right at the dawn of these debates about what punk was or wasn’t. Those disputes raged not only in the corporate label and promotional worlds eager to monetize the trend, but also between fans themselves, even to this day, about authenticity. Depending on your crowd, the Ramones’ sound might be harmless bubblegum pop or raw power directly descended from the fearsome thicket of noise The Stooges created, which is probably why the Ramones’ reputation and legacy have only strengthened with time – they exist in the hard-to-reach space between the approachable and the radical. Listen to Rocket To Russia with an open ear, and its sonic reference points offer up new vistas of sound and desire each time. It’s the paradox of how great art functions: singularly meaningful and yet radically open to meaning-making.
