“I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made eleven albums that sound exactly the same. In fact, we’ve made twelve albums that sound exactly the same.”

That’s Angus Young, waggishly owning up to AC/DC’s ironclad fidelity to their sound. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear a casual fan of the Ramones accuse them of the same homogeneity. The Ramones had an image to which they were stubbornly faithful to the end, and their first three albums—their landmark self-titled debut (1976), Leave Home (1977),...