If you took a survey on the street and got a good sample size of ordinary, average Western civilization-type human beings of a reasonable age (let's say 20+ years), you'll likely find out that people are more likely, possibly a great deal more, to recognize the name of Oingo Boingo's frontman over the name of the band itself. And huge fans of Oingo Boingo would find this perfectly reasonable. How many other bands share this trait? You got your Kurt Cobains and your Ozzy Osbournes, who may be recognizable names to people who couldn't name but everyone has heard of Nirvana and Black Sabbath. Maybe someone like Rod Stewart (the Faces) is good example, but the guy from Oingo Boingo even has the distinction of not moving on to be a successful solo artist. No, I think this is a pretty unique case.
The frontman, of course, is Danny Elfman, known for the soundtracks and scores to numerous major motion pictures such as the two Pee-Wee Herman movies, the first two Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, nearly everything Tim Burton ever did, and a whole wealth of other endeavors. He composed "The Simpsons" theme. You may even know the horror music he scored for "when Donald Trump stood behind Hillary Clinton during the second 2016 president debate" which was a meme everyone forgot after 20 minutes. Anyway, the point being that you wouldn't know him from fuckin' who-cares Oingo Boingo even though it was the greatest achievement of his career. Whatever.
Anyway, Oingo Boingo. Yeah. The whole thing started as a musical theater project of Danny's brother Richard Elfman in 1972, and back then they called themselves The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Richard eventually passed the torch to Danny, who continued the fanciful cabaret traditions and slowly transformed the troupe into the rock band it would become by the '80s. During this whole time they were almost completely unknown outside of the Los Angeles scene, and eventually got their big break when an early version of their "Only a Lad" song from their 1980 self-titled EP got a lot of airplay on the local radio.
I find this progression into modest success rather interesting. Go ahead and try to draw comparisons to other early new wave acts such as Devo, or Wall of Voodoo, or XTC, or whatever, but Oingo Boingo came into their own slowly and organically and formed a truly unique miasma of post-punk, ska, pop, and most importantly, cabaret. "Importantly", because cabaret was far from cool in the punk scene and nobody else wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. At least on the early Oingo Boingo albums, you sometimes get a creepy circus vibe that really really works. And Danny's voice is perfect for this marriage of styles, just a manic rubber bouncy ball of alternating highs and lows of both pitch and intensity.
Which brings us to their debut album Only a Lad. A fully fleshed out piece of work, this album is. The band's personnel here is made up of eight musicians, scaling back from 400 or however many made up the original Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, saxes, trumpets, trombones, it's like the fucking Blood, Sweat & Tears lineup, only good music is played instead!
But, man, how to describe what you're hearing when you drop the needle in the ol' groove? "Little Girls" begins the album with a cheesy, self-aware sarcastic horn fanfare as if welcoming in Pope Alzheimers XIV and then the disjointed, angular, punky new-wavey real intro kicks in, and then it's a bunch of pedophile-friendly lyrics sung by a pedophile-friendly voice! What gives! This shit is so catchy, but the subject matter is so unsavory! Why is Danny Elfman doing this to me? With lyrics like "I-I-I love little girls/They make me feel so good/I love little girls/They make me feel so bad" how am I supposed to admit to enjoying this godless song to the other women in my knitting circle?
OK, at least the in-your-face deliberate discomfort of "Little Girls" is the most shame you'll feel within the next 40 minutes. The next track, "Perfect System", is a nervous-energy cartoonish advertisement of communism where Elfman sounds like he's singing its praises with a gun to his head ("In a perfect system/There's no confrontation/Unnecessary friction/To impede our concentration/We've simply done away with /Unnecessary friction"). You can hear his clenched teeth as he spits out the verses, and while the lyrics look quite David Byrne-esque in print, Elfman really pumps the words chock-full of ambiguities in implication and connotation with his rubberband voice every chance he gets. "Capitalism" is an equally nervous-energy cartoonish adverisement of capitalism where Elfman sounds annoyed that he has to sing its praises at all, even. Here again, lyrics say one thing ("There's nothing wrong with Capitalism/There's nothing wrong with free enterprise/Don't try to make me feel guilty/I'm so tired of hearing you cry"), but the vocals sneer through every line. At a casual glance, the tone and message of these two songs appear to be conservative but you don't really know where Elfman stands on any of this. While he may not agree with his own message, while he may be playing a character, he still isn't afraid to leave listeners hanging to make their own interpretations.
Take the title track "Only a Lad" as another example. A tale of a shitty kid with psychopathic, violent tendencies, this time the satire appears to be taking a shot at the liberal viewpoint ("Only a lad/You really can't blame him/Only a lad/Society made him" and "Perhaps if we're nice, he'll go away"), and in it he includes a line with delivery that betrays his true feelings ("Hey there Johnny boy/I hope you fry!"). This suggests that perhaps Elfman isn't dyed-in-the-wool on either side of the political spectrum, and perhaps presents these messages this way as an encouragement for his listeners to be free-thinkers themselves? Could be?
But don't let me get in the way of your enjoyment of Only a Lad with boring, pseudo-political, mostly incorrect analysis! There's a lot of other fun to be had here! If your brain is broken like mine, you'll find this album's version of "You Really Got Me" a vast improvement over the Kinks' original, and I won't do it justice describing it here. "Controller" ramps the paranoia up to 11 with high-energy lyricism that, I believe, describes the fear of someone coming by to steal away creativity ("There's someone knockin' on my door/There's someone knockin' on my door/I think they're looking for me/I think they're looking for me/Pretend there ain't nobody home /Don't make a sound, don't even move/Don't give them nothing to see/I think they're looking for me")."Nasty Habits", the album's closer, may very well be the best song on the record as Oingo Boingo returns to its roots with a full-on ska-tinged circus nightmare, and leaves you creeped out all over again.
SOME SONGS I COULD DO WITHOUT, HOWEVER. "What You See" is so unremarkable and plodding that it will make you forget the number 7 (WHICH IS THE TRACK NUMBER, YOU SEE). "Imposter" is ok enough, but sandwiched between "Controller" and "Nasty Habits" it gets lost a bit by the surrounding greatness. "On the Outside" is actually a good song; it doesn't belong in this paragraph, but you might forget about it anyway since it has the most straightforward beat of any other song on the album EXCEPT maybe boring' ol "What You See".
OTHER CRITICISMS: Man, I don't know. I hate to pull the "lack of diversity" card, because I don't sincerely believe it's an issue, but there's a "samey" quality throughout that I can't put my finger on. Each track has its own distinct oddball personality for sure, but it's all the same flavor of oddball. Everything is herky-jerky to the nines, so all this angularity isn't tempered at all by, I don't know, mood I guess. The album's tone is plateaued for its entire duration. Again, not a bad thing at all, but if I have to compare Oingo Boingo to Oingo Boingo and nobody else, then this is a quality they improve upon in the next two albums and it is my duty to dock five invisible space points on Only a Lad for this reason.
LISTEN TO: This immensely enjoyable album.
DO NOT LISTEN TO: My dumb ass for only calling it "Good" like some charlatan.
GOOD
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