Ramones - Leave Home (Dlx)

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Free Music Notes for Leave Home (Dlx)

Free Music Review: Essential.
Hit: 5 Stars

Leave Home is no punk record; that's too basic a categorization. It's a classic rock & roll album, combining the ferocity of punk with the exuberance of early Sixties rock. Whether it's wide-eyed romanticism or sardonic nihilism, the key word here is fun, plain and simple.

What's surprising after all these years is how optimistic and romantic Leave Home is, hardly in keeping with the vitriolic punk aesthetic. On this album Joey Ramone is at his most wistful and vulnerable, especially on gorgeous songs like 'I Remember You', 'Swallow Your Pride', 'What's Your Game', and 'Babysitter'. It doesn't get any better than 'Oh Oh I Love Her So', a simple tale of love found at the Burger King, cavorting at Coney Island, and the realisation that "everything's gonna be real fine", echoing the early songwriting of Brain Wilson and Lennon-McCartney, encapsulating joyful energy perfectly.

Leave Home treads the fine line between the optimistic and satirical perfectly, and its other half is equally brilliant. The heavy production and the band's nasty sense of humour is dead-on on songs like 'Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment', 'Carbona Not Glue', the classic Todd Haynes-influenced 'Pinhead', the anti-military 'Commando', and the especially nasty 'You're Gonna Kill That Girl'. Best of all the darker songs is the wonderfully subversive 'Glad To See You Go', a song about killing one's lover just to be as notorious as Charles Manson, but brilliantly disguised as a bubblegum tune.

Not only is this new cd rerelease excellent in sound quality, but it also has a full live performance on the second half of the disc, recorded at their forst L.A. performance in 1976. The Ramones plow their way through sixteen songs in little over a half hour, wasting no time at all, perfectly capturing the energy of their early shows. If this great added bonus doen't convince you to buy this cd, nothing will.

The Ramones went on to peak with Rocket To Russia (arguably their most accomplished album) and Road To Ruin, but Leave Home remains my own personal favourite. It's the pure essence of everything that rock & roll has embodied for nearly fifty years: romantic, cheeky, energetic, and, most importantly, loud. And it was pulled off by four ugly goofs from Queens, proof they were just One Of Us. May their music live on forever...Gabba Gabba Hey.

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