Less than a year later, Mr. Yankovic dished out to the masses his second collection of oddball tunes and split-yer-sides song parodies! Guess what? It’s more of the same! Guess what else? There’s a lot of growth here to be appreciated!

In 3-D displays two very major departures from Al’s debut: the frameworks of the parodies are more faithful to their original versions, and the accordion has been cut back substantially. These new permanent changes are what, quite literally, separates the debut from the rest of the catalog in spirit. This was obviously a wise decision, since the faithfulness of the parody numbers would widen the appeal to those who would otherwise not give much of a shit about song parodies since a) a more faithful parody actually sounds more impressive, and b) a more faithful parody is, as it turns out, funnier than a less faithful parody. I don’t think I’ll have to go into detail of the wisdom of cutting back on the accordion. Needless to say, In 3-D helped elevate Al into the upper echelon of music parody kings! Obviously, barely anyone else was, or is, in that echelon anyway, BUT it was proven that Weird Al was all everybody really needed to fill this role in their lives that nobody asked for. The rest is history.

Al’s second effort consists of 11 tracks: 5 parodies, 5 originals, and 1 polka medley! Here’s another major change: every album from here on out (except for Even Worse) will contain a polka medley somewhere in the tracklist. These medleys are usually comprised of contemporary hit songs, mostly anything the average Joe has been hearing on their local radio stations in the last year or so, reinterpreted as full-fledged balls-to-the-wall over-the-top happy-go-lucky polka music! We’re talking an onslaught of frantic accordion, bouncy tuba, annoying clarinet, and flamboyant percussion! The polka-medley du jour on In 3-D is called “Polkas on 45” which is, apparently, a play on something called “Stars on 45”, a Dutch novelty group from the ’80s that mashed up popular songs over a generic drum beat. That sounds like the pits! On paper, so do these polka medleys, but really they are actually quite jolly good fun! For example, “Polkas on 45” contains lyrical snippets from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, The Doors’ “L.A. Woman”, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”, The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”, among many others. SO, over polka music, Al sings in his nasally Weird Al voice “Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break, every step you take/I’ll be watching you” and then moves right into “Darling you gotta let me know/Should I stay or should I go?…“. GET THE PICTURE?! We always have a good time in Weird Al’s house.

The five parody songs are as follows: “Eat It” (“Beat It” by Michael Jackson), “The Brady Bunch” (“The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats), “I Lost on Jeopardy” (“Jeopardy” by The Greg Kihn Band), “King of Suede” (“King of Pain” by The Police), and “Theme from Rocky XIII” (“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor). Of these five the only one with zero lasting power was “Jeopardy”, so kudos once again to Al for choosing his parody targets somewhat wisely. “Eat It” and “Theme from Rocky XIII” are both about food, helping ensnare his morbidly obese target demographic nicely! Al even cracked the Top 40 with “Eat It”, which largely clinched his status as a household name from this album forward. The only miss here is “The Brady Bunch”, which, halfway through, becomes just the lyrics of The Brady Bunch theme! Come on Al, now’s not the time in your career to make lazy songwriting decisions! It’s kind of funny hearing these early Weird Al parodies lacking the more impressive lyrical mastery from later-career parodies, not to mention that they’re all only kind of funny. He really does get better at this as time goes on.

Now the originals, this is where the real meat is at! Sort of! You’ll be able to tell that I like the originals better than the parodies by how much more I’ll talk about them! “Midnight Star” is all about a shitty Weekly World News-type tabloid newspaper and the song sounds like Born to Run-era Bruce Springsteen. “Mr. Popeil” is all about inventor Ron Popeil’s infomercials and the song sounds like the B-52s. “Nature Trail to Hell” is all about an advertisement for a new cheesy slasher film hitting the theaters and the song sounds kinda like elements of Black Sabbath, and uh, I don’t know, Nick Cave maybe, with some operatic female backing vocals thrown in for good measure. These three songs are phenomenal, showcasing Al’s ability to cobble together some loose influences and craft a supremely catchy tune without straying too far into rip-off territory. “Nature Trail to Hell”, the closer, is an especially standout track, considering it doesn’t sound like much like any real song I can think of. It starts out with a cool, eerie, atmospheric tapestry of spoooOoOoOoOooooky hell noises, leading to an organ-laden musical intro and some of Al’s take on Vincent Price-styled vocals in the opening verse. In the middle is the keenest, neatest little clarinet solo you ever did done hear on, like, any album ever! It’s so sinister and jaunty that you can just picture a fat little fucking imp cavorting around playing his little Hell-fife.

Not all the originals are that good, though. “That Boy Could Dance” is an extremely forgettable old-school Americana rock song, bringing to mind the Doobie Brothers or the Eagles or some other generic roots rock dinosaurs of yore. “Buy Me a Condo” is even more dreadful, displaying a mocking pastiche of Bob Marley-era reggae that borders on racist with lyrics like “Gonna buy me a condo/Never have to mow me lawn/I get a funny little t-shirt/Wit’ de alligator on“. Yuck. Although picturing Bob Marley selling Amway products while wearing LaCoste polo shirts is pretty amusing. He’s fucking dead though, you asshole, so stop laughing.

What? Oh yeah. Anyway, In 3-D is a significant improvement over his self-titled debut and this level of quality will remain consistent, more or less, as he keeps pumping out albums. This particular record is the blueprint for the rest of Al’s career, so even if you’re a snooty, snobby fan of only lo-fi ’90s Estonian depressive black metal EPs this is still the best album to listen to in order to sharpen your historical knowledge of the quintessential pop-savvy parody expert. No self-respecting nerd in 2020 is allowed to pretend he/she/xe is too cool for Weird Al anymore.

GOOD

Following the release of The Pod, the young and fresh-faced Ween boys set out on their first major United States tour, a modest U.K. tour, and signed onto a major record label. Things were finally starting to really look up for these doofuses!

Pure Guava is Ween ‘s silly psychedelic pop record. Now, being signed onto Elektra Records means a conscious change in production values. Compared to The Pod this album sounds like an audiophile’s wet dream, so that’s a plus. Also, being the complete assholes that they were, being signed onto a major label probably also meant doing everything they could to deliberately straddle the invisible line between commerciality and total fuck-you inaccessibility. In other words, Pure Guava is a lot more of the same old shit.

This album, like its predecessor, was recorded crudely on a four-track cassette outside of a professional studio, this time with a little more care to make (almost) everything very listenable. Besides the fact that the songs don’t sound like they were funneled through a sewer drain, almost every single track on Ween’s third album sounds like an outtake from The Pod. While the shitty production paired with the sick and stoned backstory added a extra layer of thematic continuity on The Pod, here the slicker production just makes these 19 tracks sound even more blatantly like a hodge-podge of cobbled-together cuts. There’s still distortion, and electronic hooligan antics, and mumbled, addled “singing”, and repetitive loops, but most of it is directionless and unexciting.

Against all odds, Pure Guava yielded Ween’s highest-ever charting single “Push th’ Little Daisies”, which also got the MTV music video treatment (and then some publicity on Beavis & Butthead). It’s one of the better tracks, for sure, where Gener’s vocals are warped into a demented, squealing Eric Cartman-like voice as he sings “PUUUUSH THE LITTLE DAISIES AND MAKE ‘EM COME UP!” At first thought it seems like the song might be about death, right? Other interpretations say it’s about titties and nipples, which is more in-line with what one would expect from these dorks! At any rate, the melody is rather inventive, poppy and pretty for stupid song about boobs. The music video is pretty funny too, you should Youtube it right now.

Only a few other choice cuts remain, but nothing here reaches the heights of the best material on The Pod. I like “Big Jilm” a lot, it’s a big, dumb, hilarious truckin’ anthem that inexplicably borrows some lyrics from “I Gots a Weasel” off of the debut GodWeenSatan: The Oneness. It’s rolls back and forth on a couple of chords, it’s got some jaunty “doo-doo-doo“s, it’s got Gene and Dean yelling “BIG JILM!” and “THE BIGGEST THING YOU EVER DID DONE SEE BIG JILM!” in their best hick voices. Legend has it the song was supposed to be called “Big Jim” but Deaner’s handwriting was terrible, and the rest is history! I also probably like “The Goin’ Gets Tough From the Getgo” more than I should because I find the pretentious, artsy-fartsy Bohemian caricature portrayals extremely authentic and amusing, complete with subtle little condescending snorts as they sneer effeminately through lines like “Scrape for a dollar/You’ll die smiling/Learning the same lessons once again” and getting each other’s approval (“Isn’t that right, Gener?” / “So right, tell me again once more“). My last major soft spot is for “Reggaejunkiejew”, a song that is possibly about a white-guy-with-dreadlocks poseur that one of the Ween guys knows personally. The song runs through some abrasive electronic loops under some menacingly aggressive shit-talk. “Take a permanent vacation/Get the fuck out of town/Go see Jamaica, motherfucker/Let your dreadlocks down“. Oh yeah, and the repeated “Matzofarian Reggaejunkiejew, fuck you!” makes me laugh every time!

“Little Birdy”, “Tender Situation”, “Springtheme” and “Don’t Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)” are the other passable tunes, making this album incredibly front-loaded. The rest of the album, as far as I’m concerned, is total filler. By my count, that’s 11 more tracks. Most of the back half of the album is terribly uninteresting and flat, with particular special attention to “Mourning Glory” which I consider to be the very first truly awful Ween track released on an official LP. It’s one big five-minute earache consisting of Gener screaming into the microphone like a Tony Soprano dumb guy over very loud guitar feedback about pumpkins and the woods and god knows what else. It’s very hard to understand and it goes on way too long. I also strongly dislike “I Play It Off Legit” because I feel like Ween literally did this (whatever this is) better two tracks ago on “The Goin’ Gets Tough From the Getgo”. That one was funny! This one isn’t! This one has a less interesting looping background vamp and it doesn’t have funny voices! Everything else doesn’t get too bad, but nothing at all is added to the table. Songs like “Flies on My Dick” and “Touch My Tooter” are silly and dumb and devoid of enough musical progression to keep it interesting for longer than a minute. Songs like “Loving U thru It All” and the previously mentioned “I Play It Off Legit” employ the repetitive call-and-response schtick that Ween did WAY better earlier on “Blackjack” (GodWeenSatan: The Oneness) or “Molly” (The Pod). Songs like “I Saw Gener Cryin’ In His Sleep” and “Pumpin’ 4 the Man” are forgettable throwaway vignettes.

I guess the bottom line here is that even though The Pod was gross and murky and intentionally difficult to enjoy, the high points on that album really were pretty high. The melodies were imaginative, the tone was sludgy and atmospheric, it all came together pretty well, and a few more repeated listens brought something new to the ear. Pure Guava‘s high points aren’t that high, the melodies are almost entirely unimaginative, and the tone is…I don’t know, there is no tone. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel wading through this record…I guess I feel like the effort just wasn’t put into this and it shows. That was probably the point. I like irony as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t enhance my own life to pretend to like Pure Guava more than I actually do. Repeated listens certainly didn’t help me, either. To each his own though, plenty of reviews of this album are favorable and many people consider this one to be the pinnacle, but I think that’s absolutely nuts! Congrats to Ween on their major label debut, but I’m gonna place this one firmly at the bottom of my list and just move on.

KINDA BAD

It’s 1990. Imagine buying Ween’s debut GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, their aggressive and trashy post-hardcore record scattered with occasional strange gospel, folk, psychedelic, funk, and pop tunes. Imagine becoming completely enraptured by its quirky goodness; imagine being hooked by its charming immaturity. Imagine looking forward to what else Ween has to offer. It’s now 1991. Imagine scouring the shelves at your local Sam Goody (ha!) and coming across Ween’s newest album, The Pod! More of the same right? Oh boy!

The Pod is Ween’s murky, druggy album. The tone of their second album is such a radical departure from the first that you’ll be scratching your head wondering why they didn’t just continue with the winning formula they had established on their debut. Of course, no one, possibly not even Gene Ween and Dean Wean themselves, had prescient knowledge of Ween’s trajectory at the time. No one yet knew that EVERY album would be such a radical departure. But, again, place yourself in 1991. Ween’s second album is out to the public in all its glory, and all you have is the first album to compare it to. So, how does it compare?

In my quest to absorb and appreciate every album by every artist on the planet, and hopefully become an immortal being along the way that can continue this quest indefinitely (oh please God please make it happen), I try not to compare a band’s work to their other work as a basis for judgment. Try as I might, though, I consider Ween’s first three albums to be a loosely cohesive package deal due to their similar base artistic ambitions and recurring themes, and I’m not as enamored with The Pod as I am with GodWeenSatan: The Oneness. People either love or hate The Pod with not much room for fence-straddlers, but I’m absolutely straddling that fucking fence. Bite me!

The first bone I have to pick with this album is the dreary production. The lore states that the Ween boys recorded this on a four-track cassette recorder in their apartment (nicknamed “The Pod”, aha!) while both were stricken with mono and constantly high on, of all substances, Scotchgard! Only the part about the four-track recorder is actually confirmed, but the sick and stoned aspect of the backstory certainly adds to the experience. These 23 tracks are like one big uncomfortable fever trip. An hour and fifteen minutes of gloomy, plodding tunes. Some sllllloooooooowwww and joyless, some fast and upbeat, some even precious and pleasant. Almost all of them completely sludgy, distorted, and disconcerting. The production, while deliberate and appropriate, is tough to take for such an incredible length of time all in one sitting. The sameness can be claustrophobic.

As for the songs themselves, the filler here is way more obvious. I feel like the debut had something to offer on every single one of its 29 tracks, but The Pod has a fair share of total throwaways. Most of it’s on the album’s back half, with “Don’t Sweat It”, “Laura”, “Boing”, “Alone”, “Moving Away”, and “She Fucks Me” being my picks for immediately tossing in the goddamn garbage without an ounce of regret. All of them are slow and repetitive as shit without enough melody, or even humor, to salvage them. Other filler tunes on the front half are semi-amusing enough, such as the stoned-out “Pollo Asado” where the Ween boys fumble their way through Mexican restaurant take-out order over some pleasantly plinky background music (“Ok, that’ll be $16.07…Out of $20?…Ok, $16.07’s your change.“), or the tone-setting sleepy opener “Strap on That Jammypac” which, I think, is all about that makeshift Scotchgard bong shown on the album cover. Hey, speaking of which, if you’re a Leonard Cohen fan then that cover should look familiar! They lifted it from Cohen’s The Best of Leonard Cohen greatest hits compilation and slapped picture of a guy wearing a bong-mask right over Cohen’s mug! Now that’s funny!

That’s enough for the negatives, at any rate. For the defense, I’m still a big appreciator of Ween’s relatable brand of stupid humor which is all over this record. It’s just this dumb, teenage, inside-jokey, sneery asshole-type humor that, while I can’t speak for anyone else, I can certainly connect with. I like that they have the balls to just put it out there, too. The over-the-top voices/accents, the constant mentions of “pork roll, egg and cheese”, the snickering that they left in everywhere. The nonsense call-backs from the first album, such as Eddie Dingle or the established brotherly love between the two Ween boys. I love the beginning of “Pollo Asado” where Deaner asks over the romantic muzak “Come on, it’s a beautiful night for a walk on the beach, wouldn’t you say?” and then Gener responds in his best racist faux-Hispanic male stoner Pedro-From-Napoleon–Dynamite voice “YES, I WOULD SAY THAT…I WOULD SAY THAT” before launching right into ordering Mexican food. I love the absurdly off-time percussion stops and starts in “Molly” while the Weens grumble through their “Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly Molly” choruses. I love the completely indulgent ’70s hard rock send-ups of “Dr. Rock” and “Sketches of Winkle” played straight amidst all terrible distortion. That shit is hilarious!

Not to mention that there quite a few very good melodies hidden in the sludge. The aforementioned high-energy “Dr. Rock” and “Sketches of Winkle” have some very tasty guitar licks, while songs like “Captain Fantasy” have snarky falsetto passages that can get stuck in your head for days. “Right to the Ways and the Rules of the World” is a slow, fanciful proggy tune that has a beautifully simple…I want to say it’s an organ…melody linking together the verses. “Mononucleosis” is the haunting, feverish, possibly autobiographical account of one of the Ween boys (Deaner?) falling ill with mono and the grief that the other one (Gener?) is going through. Once the song is over you’re gonna think you just got mono yourself. “The Stallion (Pt. 1)” is completely, unnecessarily in-your-face with an onslaught of aggression and industrial noise, while Gener spits lines in a haughty medieval-type voice stuff like “YOU GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH/YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT” and “I’M THE STALLION, MANG“. And don’t sleep on the more restrained reprise, “The Stallion (Pt. 2)”, at the end of the album. It’s just as uproariously stupid! “Deaner! Deaner!/Dude, where can you be?/Come hither!/Who are you?/The stallion!…”

So there you go, the good is really good and the bad is really bad. That’s about right. Whether you do love it, or hate it, or are a loathsome fence-straddler like me, the agreed consensus on The Pod is that it’s 1) Ween’s most inaccessible album, and 2) Ween’s most quintessentially “Ween”-like album. In other words, this album mustn’t be overlooked and only serious attempts to break through the barrier must be taken. In the end, the opinion you form should be your own. The Boognish himself wouldn’t accept anything less from his prospective disciples.

JUST OK

Jesus Christ, more Flo and Eddie?? For all the background you could ever need on these two losers, see my reviews for Zappa’s previous three albums Chunga’s Revenge, Fillmore East – June 1971, and 200 Motels. I’m tired of talking about them.

Guys like Zappa, I know their discographies like the back of my ugly, deformed hand. Even so, I try to make a point to re-listen to an extremely familiar album at least once more before finalizing one of these reviews. I couldn’t bring myself to do it for Just Another Band from L.A.; I really hate the album that much. The whole Flo and Eddie era feels like one big weird wart in the Zappa catalog, and thank fucking Christ that around this time some lunatic had the good sense to push Frank off stage and cripple him for six months, temporarily rendering him unable to tour and forcing stupid Flo and stupid Eddie to fuck off and pursue their own stupid, unsuccessful endeavors! But I’d rather talk about that incident during the Waka/Jawaka album review when I’m in a better goddamn mood.

So Just Another Band from L.A. is another album of live material taken from a single show in 1971, two months after the set of concerts that made up the Fillmore East – June 1971 album. Once again, Flo & Eddie are at the forefront. Once again, the material puts a heavy focus on jokey goofin’ antics and spoken word nonsense while the music itself is secondary. ONCE AGAIN, it blows chunks.

I’ll start with a positive: “Billy the Mountain”, as a concept, is among the most innovative and ballsy ideas Zappa ever had, and he had a lot of them. This live track, clocking in at nearly 25 minutes, tells the story of a mountain–a mountain named Billy–and the wacky hijinks as he travels–yes, travels–across the country with his wife Ethell–a tree growing out of Billy’s shoulder. It sounds extremely stupid, because it is, and it’s not the plot itself that I’m lauding here, because I’m absolutely not. What I can appreciate is the effort, especially since it’s the effort itself that separates this album from its sister album Fillmore East – June 1971. I can appreciate the craft of the story, the twisted “Peter and the Wolf”-style fairy tale that it is. I can appreciate the guts to turn it into a stage show, and the decision to finally actually use Flo and Eddie in a way that makes sense. I can appreciate the flexibility of the story itself, which feels like a bare-bones framework with which to insert some musical and vocal improvisations at-will. This particular cut is taken from a single show, performed at UCLA, and the story is filled to the brim with local references that add a special touch. I mean, being from the midwest, all these local references fly right over my head (Rosamond, Gorman, Downey, the Jack-In-The-Box on Glenoaks, etc. etc. etc.), but it’s clear to me that as the band was on tour they adjusted the song to pepper in local references whether they were in Los Angeles, or Dallas, or wherever. Effort. I like that.

BUT, this doesn’t mean I enjoy “Billy the Mountain” on a gut level. I find the track to be exhausting, overlong, drab, and annoying. The hard-to-follow plot meanders quite a bit, and it’s not obvious even after a few listens that the story itself is, like, a real story. One with a beginning, middle, and end. Hmmm, where’s that effort that I was just singing all my praises about? Yeah yeah, OK, again, the story itself isn’t the point, right? It’s just a vehicle for the stage antics, fine, but…I don’t know, if you’re going to make a 25-minute stage show centered around an actual tale, I want a little more than just “the mountain gets royalty checks from posing for postcards, uses the money to travel the country, leaves a trail of destruction in its wake, and dodges the draft! This infuriates the military, who sends a guy named Studebacher Hoch to defeat the mountain! Hoch slathers syrup on himself to attract flies, the flies allow him to fly up to the mountain, Hoch tries to reason with the mountain, it doesn’t work, and Hoch falls to his death! The moral of the story: ‘A mountain is something you don’t want to fuck with’. The end! I wish I was exaggerating here, even a little. Because this track goes on for almost 25 minutes it’s very difficult to not check your watch as it plods along, occasionally teasing you with interesting instrumental garnishes (descending arpeggios as Studebaker Hoch falls off Billy the Mountain) and musical allusions (snippets of the Tonight Show theme with Johnny Carson, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Judy Blue Eyes”, among others) before quickly returning to Flo and Eddie’s tuneless frat boy fuckery.

It’s too bad, too, that nothing is salvaged on Side 2 of the record either. The remaining four tracks are a spiritual continuation of exactly what one gets on Fillmore East – June 1971 with the added bonus of EVEN MORE local Los Angeles references that no one outside of Orange County or born after 1956 will even understand. “Call Any Vegetable” is a dismal live version of the song (originally from Absolutely Free) which is pretty standard until THE FLO & EDDIE COMEDY TROUPE butts in with some dumb shit halfway through that sucks. AND FRANK ALLOWS IT. This, to me, is the most heinous disgrace. “Eddie, Are You Kidding?” is, supposedly, all about a local discount men’s clothing store and the owner’s constant television advertisements. Yeah, ok, that’s a cool song for Fred from Warsaw, Indiana to listen to and appreciate. “Magdalena” is the SECOND SONG in the Zappa catalog that’s about daughter-fuckin’. Fred from Warsaw, IN perked up a bit here! The album concludes with a sad rendition of Uncle Meat‘s “Dog Breath”.

For a guy who spent so much of his energy working and creating, Just Another Band from L.A. and, really, any of the other Flo & Eddie material couldn’t possibly have been something Frank was particularly proud of. All this stuff is oddly deprived of real music, it just feels empty and cold and unnecessary. Again, some guy basically crippled Frank a few months after this show and forced him to completely alter the trajectory of his career. I shudder to think how much longer the Flo & Eddie era could have really continued if this didn’t happen. We could have gotten another 35 albums of this shit! We’ll never know their sophisticated opinions on the 1979 gas crisis or the launch of MTV or the Iran-Contra Affair! Oh no!

Fuck Flo. Fuck Eddie. Fuck this completely inessential album.

SUCKS

By now the nail was most certainly in the coffin for any hopes that Oingo Boingo would return to their manic and quirky early ska punk days. If the cover of their sixth album Boi-Ngo is any indication of the band’s steadfast ascension to maturity, then feast your weary eyes! The full band is on display for the first (and only) time! And what a band of sophisticates it is! Widow’s Peak, Poofy Hair, Beardy, Shifty, they’re all here! I see a guy with a fucking beret on his head. At least Danny Elfman himself has the good sense to stay coy, obviously concealing a goofy shit-eating grin, and reassuring us that the band hasn’t entirely lost its humorous edge.

But, yeah, to say that Boi-Ngo is a return to form after the tepidity of Dead Man’s Party is like saying that 9/11/02 was a better 9/11 than the previous 9/11. The production has improved drastically…so drastically, in fact, that this is likely their best sounding album ever. Crisp contrast and wide dynamic range here really make those fuckin’ horns POP without sounding too slick and cheesy, so congrats Oingo Boingo for narrowly avoiding making your 1987 album sound like it came out in, god-forbid, 1990. Ha! Along with the improved production, the energy is back too. It’s not as frantic as the days of old for the band, but Boi-Ngo recaptured the sorely lacking urgency of Dead Man’s Party while tempering the edges with more, let’s say, enlightened melodies and strong structures. That is to say, take the energy from the early albums and strip away all the weirdness and you’ve got Boi-Ngo. Take what you can get.

I like this album a lot, but only after accepting the fact that the band’s usual charming strangeness was gone now. Without the charming strangeness it all feels very pointless at first, like why would I even bother listening to this when I could listen to literally anything else? This was a tough hurdle to get over, and unfortunately this is what likely hurts Boi-Ngo the most: the shattered hope. BUT, aha, this is yet another perfect opportunity to drive home my philosophy of learning to enjoy an album on its own merits instead of trying to compare it to the band’s earlier, or “best”, or most quintessential, efforts. Listen to it in a vacuum and what do you get? Let’s break it down.

The album kicks off with “Home Again”, which sets the vibe immediately. Gone are the high-energy, rockin’, paranoid openers of yore. This one is high-energy, rockin’…not paranoid, though. Optimistic? Hopeful? Even a little sappy? Dig into the lyrics a little and you’ll learn that this is one of those stories as old as time about losing one’s way, losing innocence, never being able to go back and unsee what’s been seen (“He’s got charisma/But when he’s all alone/He curls up in a ball/And wishes that he was home again…/Home again…“). The familiar Boingo theme of introverted despair! I knew the band hadn’t changed much! Just a little bit of lyrical dissonance, but hey, what a strong and lively melody right out the gate huh? And Boi-Ngo more or less continues in this fashion, with track after track of lively, upbeat earworms offering nothing more profound than an enjoyable listening experience (even if Elfman thinks he’s being more profound than reality proves). “Where Do All My Friends Go” weaves in sneaky, slithering funk throughout the call-and-response lyrical phrasing (“I’ll follow you until I die/Tell me where my friends go/With outstretched arms into the sky/Tell me where my friends go“), chugging along on unrelenting momentum. “Elevator Man” is nothing more than a four-and-a-half minute cunnilingus joke (“Who’s goin’ down/Who’s comin’ with me?“) and it’ll make you feel oh-so-sleazy for enjoying the shit out of it! These first three songs are an incredibly solid one-two-three punch of boisterous, rollicking, catchy goodness for your earholes.

Then in comes Elfman’s preachy side with “New Generation”. I always like it better when Danny waxes poetic about inner turmoil, and I can tolerate the occasional social commentary as long as the tongue is lodged firmly in the cheek (which it almost always was), but “New Generation” lacks the irony or absurd humor that I’m used to with Oingo Boingo political statements. To me, this just comes across as one of those “Wake Up, Sheeple! The media is controlling your opinions!”-type tirades that was done much more subtly on Good For Your Soul‘s “Who Do You Want To Be” and much more effectively later on Boingo’s “Insanity”. It’s an interestingly structured song, and I like cool echoed horns during the choruses, but this is the longest track on the album and it essentially plods along on a couple of chords and a monotone delivery. AND THEN, there’s an even more monotone bridge where Elfman does his best to rattle off a diatribe using his lowest available quasi-guttural register. I consider this the album’s only real misstep.

The energy on the second half doesn’t reach the same heights that the first three songs achieved, but it’s respectable all the same. No stinkers! “We Close Our Eyes” is a stinker on the surface, though! It’s all ballad-y and shit, but oh my god is it a contender for the most beautiful melody ever cooked up by these nerds. And it’s actually uplifting too, no lyrical dissonance this time. It’s the kind of song you’d find at the end of a John Hughes movie if John Hughes movies were about death and dying and old people falling in love, like, right before they die. Plus, I’m a sucker for the dang ol’ accordion all over the place. “Not My Slave” continues the sentimental sappiness; it’s about love and commitment again, as are a lot of songs out there in the world. But are you hearing that melody? Jumping Jesus, where was all this songwriting talent on Dead Man’s Party? On “My Life” we’re once again back to personal mental anguish, but we’re not going to stoop to manic ska are we? Oh no no no, it’s all slow funk, baby! “Outrageous” nearly reaches the energy level of the earlier tracks, likely the catchiest number on Boi-Ngo, and for my money, with all the synthy New Wave flourishes, it’s the closest thing to classic Oingo Boingo that we’ll ever hear again in our lives! Also, consider this one a good subtle social commentary example with the word “outrageous” itself being a prominent overwrought buzzword of its time, and Danny basically saying “fuck you, nothing is outrageous”. I love it! This is how it’s done, stupid!

What if I wrapped this review up without even mentioning the final song “Pain”? Grrr! Whoops! “Pain” combines all the good elements of Boi-Ngo thus far and distills it into a fun, pompous, rhythmically infectious, hook-laden closer. And if that weren’t enough, surprise violin accompaniment pops up between the choruses. It’ll make ya wanna press play on the album all over again!

All right, am I singing the praises too highly? Could be, I don’t know. It’s hard to make a case against the solid songwriting, production, musical ideas, and sequencing. Lyrics, of course, tend to plow headfirst through the cheese, but with melodies this strong it just all fits very well anyway. I’m not cringing just yet. Enjoy this underrated and largely unrecognized Oingo Boingo stepping stone before we all get completely soured on what is still yet to come, my friends. If you think this is cheese, then you will NOT be prepared for what’s going to hit you next! Oh man, you have no idea! Get ready!

GOOD