Too Tough To Die’s reunion with Tommy Ramone ended up a one-off. He moved on to the next challenge: producing albums by the Replacements and Redd Kross, then settling into life as one-half of a modernist bluegrass act. But hey, no matter: just like Too Tough To Die, Animal Boy slots a startling Joey Ramone vocal into A1 and a killer pop tune into B1. The rest, though, is mostly dire. Maybe it’s because there was no punk impresario to impress. Maybe Joey and Dee Dee’s respective substance-abuse problems finally caught up with their creativity. The blame can’t lie with ex-Plasmatics multi-instrumentalist Jean Beauvoir, who co-wrote SHINee’s “Destination” in 2013, proving he’s always Had It. Beauvoir demonstrated his worth by co-writing and producing “Bonzo Goes To Bitburg,” the band’s last great pop original. Typical Ramones, keeping the hardcore songs separate from the anti-Reaganism — but nothing else from the era, not even “New Aryans,” baited their hooks with this much rage. Most other acts would have hamfisted the song — the syllables overload the meter on the chorus, the lyric is greased with smarm — but as often happened, Joey’s humanism wins out. After a chuggin’ intro, Johnny’s buried under Richie and a doorbell xylophone and some wrenching “ah na na na”s, but he was probably fine with that. In return for wounding his reactionary cred, they retitled the song “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down.”

Johnny’s vision of a lean rock ‘n’ roll machine, re-attempted on Too Tough, is asserted all over Animal Boy, even though the three best cuts are essentially pop/rock, and one of them is soft as John Waite in a kiddie pool full of marshmallows. That cut is “She Belongs To Me” — nought to do with Dylan, instead a super-sensitive threat to kick some interloper’s ass, sniped over rubbery acoustic guitar, arena drums and Tunnel Of Love synths. “Something To Believe In” could’ve been a Cars hit minus Johnny’s frantic downstrokes: a keyboard-spangled “Bonzo” soundalike, but with Joey turning the aggravation selfward. The synths goose every line; the backing vocals are zirconian and gorgeous. For the video, the Ramones camp seized upon the “take my hand” line, producing a funny — if tone-deaf — parody of Hands Across America (“What is Ramones Aid all about? It’s about people. People who care. We think the time has come for caring people who care about people to stand up and be counted.”) studded with counterculture guests and also Weird Al.

Speaking of tone deafness, “Love Kills” is a sneak contender for the Ramones canon, a Dee Dee-sung rawk’n’roll ode to his old dead acolyte Sid Vicious. Performed with all the concern of a rubbernecker, farting out baldly hypocritical declaratives (“When you’re hooked on heroin/Don’t you know you’ll never win”), it’s one of the funniest punk rock songs ever recorded. It’s utterly without mercy. That’s about it, though: Animal Boy is a testament to the limits of the bassist’s gifts. Having ceded his place as a songwriter of equal productivity, Joey’s stuck sleepwalking through Dee Dee classics like “Crummy Stuff,” “Apeman Hop,” and “Animal Boy” (which at least boasts Johnny’s strangled, hollow hardcore timbre). It’s clear from his contributions that he wasn’t getting the shaft, either: “Hair of the Dog” finds him lazily trailing the chords, halfheartedly defending his alcoholism. The hard-rock “Mental Hell” acquits him better, at least on the mournful chorus, but he’s stuck behind the distance of vocal processing.

It was up to Richie to bring out the real beast in his singer. Opening cut “Somebody Put Something In My Drink” is a squealing pop-metal number about exactly what you think it is, but also it’s about Joey going absolutely batshit. Growling out of a part of the throat heretofore unknown to medical science, he goes Method on the track: stumbling around, pissing on fruity cocktails, yelling at strangers. By the end, the title reads less like an accusation and more like a request. By this point, stories of the Ramones and their crew whizzing in friends’ open containers were legend; if this song was supposed to be harrowing… well, it was, but for different reasons. Animal Boy was the last Ramones record to acknowledge a punk rock beyond theirs. For 1987’s Halfway To Sanity, they found a producer with no credentials beyond a decent demo and a love of the Ramones; they moved their pre-show pizza to after, so they could save a stop on the way home. Anyone they wanted to meet came to the shows, not the shops.