Ramones Blitzkrieg '76 (1989)

In a way, the Ramones are an ideal band to anthologize. No matter how cohesive their records were (or not), their albums always played like collections of singles and since singles are easy to anthologize, it stands to reason that the best of the Ramones' songs will sound good in nearly any context; hell, the haphazard Ramones Mania proved that. However, Rhino's double-disc Hey! Ho! Let's Go: Ramones Anthology has much greater goals than being just another collection – it strives to be the final word on the Ramones.

Appearing one year after Rhino's Ramones box set Weird Tales of the Ramones, and appearing four years after Rhino's first single-disc Ramones collection Loud, Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits – which itself appeared after Rhino's excellent double-disc Hey! Ho! Let's Go!: The Anthology – Rhino's 2006 collection Greatest Hits serves up 20 of the group's basics. Unlike 2002's Loud, Fast Ramones, Greatest Hits makes no attempt to cover anything other than the group's peak period: the first 16 songs cover 1976's Ramones through 1980s End of the Century, with a selection apiece from Pleasant Dreams ("The KKK Took My Baby Away"), Subterranean Jungle ("Outsider"), Brain Drain ("Pet Sematary") and Too Tough to Die ("Wart Hog").

Uncritical admiration is appropriate for these Schubert Lieder, where no forcing, no technical difficulties, not even a single spoiled note are to be found. It is not possible to perform Die schöne Müllerin and the other songs more heartily, more expressively than Fritz Wunderlich and his congenial, subtle accompanist Hubert Giesen do and, fortunately, will be able to do again and again, on these two records that every music lover will have to listen to stirringly.

A straightforward summary of the Shadows' first three years of habitual hit-making, opening with the pounding flurry of "Apache," then tracing through the next eight smash singles, with a handful of attendant B-sides (and one EP cut, the title track from The Boys) to round the package out. There is no denying the sheer brilliance of this early sequence. Hits like "Wonderful Land," "FBI," and "Man of Mystery" utterly rewrote the guitar's role in rock, not only musically, but culturally as well. Unquestionably, the Shadows' importance and impact diminished as the years passed, but at the outset of their career – the period documented here – they were untouchable. It is for that reason that The Shadows' Greatest Hits is still regarded in some quarters as the finest Shadows album of them all, an accolade which no other compilation (and goodness knows, there's been enough of them) has ever been able to dismiss. Even the sleeve screams "masterpiece."