Teenage Bottlerocket

While punk legends the Ramones are worthy of being an influence of just about every contemporary punk band, few decide to base their entire career off that New York City trio's three-chords-and-the-slurred-truth sound. Meet Teenage Bottlerocket, the current leaders of the still-fledgling Ramones-core scene. The Laramie, Wyoming, quartet wears leather jackets, plays with its collective legs spread as far apart as they can go and pauses between songs only long enough to shout "1, 2, 3, 4!" The result? Its concerts feature tune after two-minute tune of Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Tommy worship. (And frankly, we can't find many things wrong with that.) The band's latest album, They Came from the Shadows, is its finest work to date, featuring songs about skateboarding ("Skate or Die"), outer space ("Forbidden Planet") and, uh, not wanting to go ("I Don't Want To Go"). The best part? The disc's barely a half-hour long, so the band can easily knock through all of it plus some back-catalog gems before the inevitable encore call.