I’m always making lists, and last year I put together a compendium of my 100 favorite albums of all time. The only hard and fast criterion followed was that at some point in my life I had to have considered each record on the list to be my absolute favorite at that time. My long list was way longer than 100 but I managed to whittle it down to a representative rundown. It’s a living document (I’ve swapped out a handful of titles since the initial drafting), but the bulk of the entries feel pretty permanent. I didn’t bother to rank them (for sorting purposes, it was easier to leave the list in alphabetical order) so I tossed the whole list into a random generator and will endeavor to break down each individual entry in this space.

Let’s begin with the Ramones, whose first four full-length releases (1976’s Ramones, 1977’s Leave Home and Rocket to Russia and 1978’s Road to Ruin) are all bulletproof compendiums of raw punk energy and deceptively sweet songcraft. So why do I gravitate toward a far more uneven release from the Ramones’ tumultuous 1980s?