...Ya Know?

This is the title of the new Joey Ramone album released a few weeks ago. The album consists of demos that were stripped down to just the vocals, then instruments were added. It is a lot better than I expected it to be, considering it is composed of leftovers. In fact, it's better than Joey's previous solo album Don't Worry About Me. This clearly isn't four stars out of five; it's definitely three and a half. Hence, this makes me realize I need to downgrade Don't Worry About Me to three stars (which I consider a good rating; a three-star album on Allmusic is usually crap, at least when the rating isn't just random and unrelated to the review! Anyone who reads Allmusic knows what I'm talking about...)

Every song is at least decent, several are very good, and there is one masterpiece, a number called "Waiting for that Railroad." My only quibble is that this song is done up to be basically a power ballad; it might have been better served keeping it a little more understated (for comparison, listen to the acoustic radio version from the early 90s on Youtube). In any case, it's still clearly the rock & roll classic of 2012. Not that anyone seems to have realized this.

There is more stylistic variety on this album than its predecessor, and that is also good. It is a long album (15 songs) and might be better in two installments. This is because, despite the fact that there is more variety, there is a certain similarity of tempo throughout.

Ed Stasium, the producer, said Joey's pitch was perfect on the demos, and so nothing was auto-tuned. I was a little skeptical about this, but today I saw a short promo video with Richie Ramone (who plays drums on a few tracks) and he also said that Joey's pitch was perfect--and then added that this is surprising because, if you listen to a live Ramones recording, no matter how well or poorly the band could hear themselves, Joey's pitch was always off! This seems like a bit of an exaggeration but Joey's live vocals in the 80s were often definitely not great (although in the studio they usually were great. [According to me, not Richie] ).

Other highlights: "Going Nowhere Fast," "New York City," "What Did I Do To Deserve You?", "Seven Days of Gloom,""Party Line." That's a lot of highlights, but it is a long album. Again, nothing on it is bad.