When you think about it, New Found Glory covering The Ramones makes plenty of sense. The way both bands hop between chords isn’t that dissimilar, and you can sure as hell count The Ramones in the influences of Jordan Pundik & co.
What’s obvious immediately here is that New Found Glory are doing this for the fun rather than making a statement, and also that New Found Glory are pretty fucking great at sounding exactly The Ramones. The UK Spotify version of this record has the tracks wrong (metadata is king, guys), and you’d actually be forgiven you were listening to the originals at points if you weren’t paying attention. This is very unlikely to be the record that changes your mind about New Found Glory or The Ramones, but if it makes a few kids jump backwards and check out the latter, then at least they don’t think it’s just a cool t-shirt design.
When covering bands like the Ramones, whether you stay honest to the original and draw claims of “what’s the point?” or make them yourself and get lynched for it, you’re kinda screwed, and New Found Glory do seem to have got that problem here and shrugged their shoulders at it.
It’s just something they wanted to do, so they went ahead and did it. To be honest, they probably could have just dusted off that whole Ramones anthology box set everyone has gathering dust somewhere and covered the whole thing in an afternoon, but the six picks here are great Ramones songs, and they did a great job with the best of the bunch (‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’), so who cares? A bit of fun, and one bound to have a bit of a limited lifespan, but worth a spin to inspire you to have a flick through both band’s back catalogues.
TOM AYLOTT