How cool was I buying this album in 2004 when I was 16 years old? How cool was it when my mom came into my room one day while I was blasting it and mistook it for Duran Duran? How cool was it that, instead of discouraging me from listening to Oingo Boingo, it encouraged me to try Duran Duran? What a story!
NEEDLESS TO SAY, Duran Duran was a big disappointment. And, over the years, Dead Man's Party has proven to be quite a big one for me as well. Seeing that it was my very first introduction to Oingo Boingo I maintain a certain fondness for the album TO THIS VERY DAY, but I'm not deaf to its faults and shortcomings. After all, Dead Man's Party was the band's official debut on MCA Records (I don't count So-Lo), so maybe there was a lot of pressure to not disappoint the label that brought the world such shimmering gems as The Fixx or Alanis Fucking Morissette? Perhaps this was the destined path of the maturing Danny Elfman-led outfit? Maybe we can blame the mid-'80s and just leave it at that? Make any excuse you want for it, but moreso than any album so far this comes across as neutered and sterilized to oblivion. It's not bad, not really I guess. It's just mediocre. And from such a talented individual like Elfman it's almost a worse offense.
It's hard to find sufficient background information about Dead Man's Party, which is telling in of itself, but I do know that we lost Rich Gibbs on keyboards bringing the head count back down to eight. Paul Fox, also on keyboards, dropped out, so both of these guys were replaced by Mike Bacich. I also know that, up until now, the band had been catching flak continuously from critics about the snarky playfulness of their earlier work. How rude of these music-making dudes to have fun while making music! Well, they took the hint, and Dead Man's Party is NO fun at all. And the critics were ok with it! This was their greatest commercial success! BAAAHHH!! BUUUHHHH!! I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something? Just listen to the mixing, for chrissake! My no-foolin' honest-to-fuck main complaint about this record is the flat flat FLAT FLAT production. No dynamics, no tension, no excitement. I won't defend half the songs that really couldn't have been helped anyway in this regard, but the other half could have really kicked some ass if the mastering had been on-par with earlier releases. Or later releases. This is an anomaly in the catalog, certainly, and it's a frustrating situation.
"Just Another Day" starts us off on a somber note. At first it sounds like Duran Duran's "Rio", and then it starts to sound like a more goth version of "Rio". The subject matter of the song should seem like familiar enough territory as a ballad of hopeless paranoia and despair akin to, say, "Private Life" from Nothing to Fear or maybe "Pictures of You" from Good for Your Soul. This time, however, the vibe is bereft of quirky panic or leery anxiety, and replaced instead with just-plain-not-funny Joy Division levels of bleak melancholy with Morrissey levels of self-seriousness and Robert Smith levels of fuck-you-I-can't-take-it-too-seriously-anyway on my end as a listener. But, goddamnit, it's hard to get the song out of my head for a while after listening to it, and Elfman's voice is incredibly suited for expressing this manner of emotion, as melodramatically operatic as it may be. I can't in good conscience call this a bad song. NEXT!
"Dead Man's Party" suffers from a 6+-minute song length, punctuated further by its mid-tempo urgency and lumbering progression, but otherwise it's textbook Oingo Boingo. Macabre, dance-y, tinged with ska, and replete with non-distracting mismatched time signatures. In fact, it's so textbook that this is THE quintessential Oingo Boingo song, and the song that the band's public image is almost completely based upon. Check it out: "Dead Man's Party", a tune that's basically a glorified "Monster Mash" send-up from the album of the same name featuring iconic partying skeletons on its cover, and it came out in late October? Congratulations! You have now been pigeonholed as a Halloween band forever, dinguses. Probably deliberate, since it's good marketing for a band who had been struggling to expand their brand beyond the Los Angeles music scene for years already. FUN FACT: The band appears as themselves in the Rodney Dangerfield laugh-o-fuckin'-rama "Back to School" playing this song. I kid you not, the scene is supposed to take place at a frat party and there's literally an "OINGO BOINGO" banner hanging behind them as they're playing, just like those adorable partying skeletons on the album cover. And the scene is riddled with awkward close-up shots of the nerds in the band. It's all pretty weak. NEXT!
I'll skip ahead to a couple of other highlights. My personal favorite is "No One Lives Forever", which is even more macabre than "Dead Man's Party" and brings back a little bit of that lost energy from the early days. Plus, I love the whole eastern European thing going on here, from the scales to the shouted "HEY!"s to the snake-y instrumentation, and it still sounds like a decent Halloween tune in the end with the creepy guitar effects that sound like rattling bones and the eerie haunted house-like atmosphere. "Weird Science", while not THE quintessential Oingo Boingo song, is certainly the most well-known one. Elfman wrote it specifically upon request for the John Hughes movie that's about Anthony Michael Hall wanting to fuck a robot he built himself, but Elfman never had a good feeling about the song and ESPECIALLY didn't like that it was Oingo Boingo's most successful single. Per Elfman, it just never felt like an Oingo Boingo song. I say poppycock, sir. "Weird Science" is the last classic you'll find for the rest of their career, and in six minutes it displays all manner of trademark quirks and the catchy, off-kilter melodic FUN that is waning fast as time goes on with the band. "Weird Science" encapsulates the essence of mid-'80s pop sensibility perfectly while largely avoiding the schmaltziness that, frankly, was really fucking easy to stumble into in 1985 (Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time", I'm staring daggers at you in particular). The awareness and apprehension of a rapidly changing technological world through the use of "modern" synth effects in songs like these are the ones that hold the test of time 30 years later because, from the future perspective, the mid-'80s feels like the fear-of-technology era. THANKS A LOT, OLD MAN REAGAN. He's dead now, so I guess it's a wash. This song also feels like a "Monster Mash" send-up, but it works better for me and it's way more fun to listen to than the title track. Eat your heart out, Thomas Dolby, this is my go-to song about SCIENCE! NEXT!
It's time to talk about what sucks now, because it's the rest of the album! Ha! The remaining songs all kind of suck. "Heard Somebody Cry" kind of sucks because of its lackluster chorus and hookless melody, and I'm not sure what kind of mood Elfman is trying to evoke because there is no emotion in anything. Not in the vocal delivery of the cryptic lyrics, certainly not in the usually-expressive horn passages, and I already complained about the flat production. NEXT! "Stay" kind of sucks mostly because of the uninspired lyrical pattern that sounds more like a grocery list than a song ("This is not a horse race where winners beat the time/This is not a funeral with mourners in a line"... and so on and on), although the gloom-awashed haze blanketed over the music is at least different from every other song on Dead Man's Party even if it makes everything feel slightly claustrophobic. NEXT! "Fool's Paradise" and "Help Me" both kind of suck for the same reason: they're vapid and forgettable pop-happy tunes without much edge or profoundness. Too bad, because they're both fine enough songs by normal standards, they just feel disposable and inessential. Lukewarm. Boring. NEXT! "Same Man I Was Before" fuses new wave with some east-Asian musical styles and a little bit of neo-soul thrown in for good measure. At least this one is unique, but it kind of sucks because the melody is pretty derivative, the infusion of soul is flimsy, and (surprise!) the progression is flat and boring. Ugh.
What else is there to say? The good songs are really good and the bad songs are just disappointing. I'll be kind with the rating on Dead Man's Party because, like I said before, this album will always have a special place in my heart. And as an introduction to the band it didn't completely scare me off, but between you and me this gets a "Kinda Bad" on the occasional off-day. Had my first introduction been Dark at the End of the Tunnel things would have been very, very different. I can at least thank Dead Man's Party for keeping me going on the Boingo train, and I'll leave it at that.
JUST OK
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