ONLY A LAD

OINGO BOINGO and in particular Danny Elfman have made quite a career for themselves with their high energy, humour filled music. I mean if you name your band OINGO BOINGO I'm thinking you don't really care if people take you seriously or not. The album's title, the cover art, this is all about having fun and doing it at a high rate of speed. Ten songs over 38 minutes as we get songs between 3 and 4 1/2 minutes and a lot of silliness.

This really is a niche style of music in my opinion. I know Danny has been very successful with his musical work with The Simpsons and Tim Burton movies in particular, but also their big hit "Weird Science" from the movie of the same name made them some cash. Some mention that this is proggy New Wave music for lack of a better description and I thought maybe I'd like this based on being in my 20's when New Wave was all over the radio and I did like some of it. This not so much, although I tried.

The vocals are an acquired taste for me, the lyrics too. I feel this is for young people who like the punk mantra of do it as fast as you can for as short a time as you can and it doesn't really matter if you can play or not it's about the attitude. Okay first off these guys can play, it's more about other multiple things that bother me on every track. There are four guys playing horns and they blast us, not my thing. And it's the lead guitarist of this 8 piece band who did the horn arrangements surprisingly. They cover THE KINKS "You Really Got Me" and please give me the VAN HALEN's rendition or the original. The processed vocals on that one early turn me off right away. I was reminded of the B-52's on "Perfect System" mostly the chorus. Rough vocals on the closer "Nasty Habits" singing about what goes on behind closed doors.

I have two other albums by this band that I prefer, this is a low 3 stars.