Oingo Boingo

Best O' Boingo
$9.49
The lesser revered punk band, yes Oingo Boingo despite the wretched name is a little bit creepy punk. They are disturbing and they amuse me greatly.

I love Dead Man's Party, it's one of my faves. But this best of album gives you a good sampling of all of the crazy stuff they came up with.

Dead Man's Party
$9.98
Product arrived quickly and in excellent condition. No complaints from me. Would purchase again from this seller.

Best of Oingo Boingo: Skeletons in the Closet
$11.98
This compilation covers the prime years of Oingo Boingo prior to their gaining mass exposure with "Weird Science" and the album "Dead Man's Party". It limits its selection to tracks from their first three albums for the A&M label.

The good thing about this collection is that this is the only single-disk compilation that gives you the original studio versions of these songs. Later compilations such as "Best O' Boingo" substitute cluttered-sounding, inferior live versions recorded before an empty auditorium in 1988. (Not exactly the metaphor one wants for their career.)

People buy compilations to minimize the number of CDs they buy, so with "Skeletons in the Closet" you won't need "Nothing to Fear". Five of these twelve songs are the best half of that second album. However, the brevity of the collection means that the other two albums are short-changed. By the time the third album "Good For Your Soul" came out, the band may have been repeating themselves and in need of a second wind, but you'll still want to download "No Spill Blood" and "Sweat" from that album and a few from their best album of this early era, "Only A Lad". In particular, the band's cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" stood as a delicious counterpoint to the Van Halen remake issued a few years earlier.

When I first saw this on a retail display I thought, "Finally they've found an excuse to put that first, brilliant Oingo Boingo EP on CD". No such luck. Adding its few tracks would have bumped the duration of this overview up to what one expects of a compilation. Or if you were thinking that you might get to hear a song or two from their first wild recordings on the soundtrack to "The Forbidden Zone", nope, missing in action. And if you were looking for the popular "Goodbye Goodbye" from the soundtrack to 'Fast Times at Ridgmont High', the label didn't bother to license that one song to fill out the collection. (You'll see the song listed on a few other Oingo Boingo best of's but it's always the live version.)

All in all it's a tough call. The lack of effort put into this assemblage almost makes it seem gratuitous. Given that it only draws from three albums and the tracklisting comes up short, you almost might as well just get those three albums - "Only A Lad", "Nothing To Fear" and "Good For Your Soul". But if you do settle for this collection, that too is a good choice - you'll probably enjoy it enough to wish you'd sprung for the original albums.

Boingo Alive: Celebration of a Decade 1979-1988
$19.98
Alive was my first real approach to Oingo Boingo. And I think it was a bad move. See, the idea of re-recording songs in a "live" context but in a studio and without a crowd should sound stupid, especially for the songs that were part of last year's album.

But the fact is, those re-recordings are incredible. They sound killer, some are a bit uptempo without sounding forced or "thrown away", guitar solos are even more insane, and these are many songs on this collection that could be considered an improvement from the originals... which is already saying much, as Boingo albums were great in the first place.

If you're a fan but are frightened by the "re-recording for money and that's ol' useless stuff", do yourself a favor, try it. But if you're novice, I suggest that you first buy Dead Man's Party or Good For Your Soul, then noodle around with other records, and then discover this definite pre-1990 best-of.