Oingo Boingo - Boi-ngo

It was early '83 that I discovered Oingo Boingo. I bought the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack and heard their song, "Goodbye, Goodbye," and I was blown away. I then started looking for and buying the band's albums and I really got a kick out of how dark and bouncy the band was. I still get a wicked grin when I think of "Only a Lad," and although I didn't really think the movie was that funny, I thought the song "Weird Science" was good, but "Dead Man's Party" was better - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

For whatever reason the quirky lads just couldn't seem to catch a break with their first few albums and A&M dropped the band, and things seemed to be over. Then in the fall of '84 Danny Elfman appeared as a solo artist with the song "Gratitude" that was in regular rotation on MuchMusic. While I don't remember much aside from that one track I still think of it as a good album. An album that featured most of the band. MCA Records had signed Danny as a solo artist, and from what I've read, Mister Elfman would renegotiate his contract to bring the band back. Oingo Boingo would release a trio of albums on MCA and Boi-ngo lands right in the middle of that run.

As much as I liked Dead Man's Party and many of the songs from Dark at the End of the Tunnel, there was something special about Boi-ngo. The band wasn't playing novelty party songs - this felt like rage that was polished into something wonderful.

They grafted their brand of weird shit onto commercial hooks and managed to maintain their integrity. In short, Boi-ngo seemed to find a way to balance all of the strange and wonderful elements that made Oingo Boingo, well, Oingo Boingo.

The opening track "Home Again" is one of my favourite songs ... the interplay between Mike Bacich's syncopated keyboard and John Avila's bass and Johnny (Vatos) Hernandez's drums is mind blowing. Add Steve Bartek's guitar parts and the horn section and you have ... magic. How this was not a hit is a mystery.

I've heard so many records that open with a sonic fury that simply cannot maintain momentum. "Home Again" is far and away for me the best song on the album ... period. However, the band just didn't let up. As the opening track fades out the dead space is filled with the a cappella intro complete with finger snaps that launches into the slow burn that makes up "Where Do All My Friends Go" which is another earworm. My goodness Sam Phipps, Leon Schneiderman and Dale Turner are a killer horn section and know how to punctuate the song in all the right places. The band sets 'em up and knocks 'em down one song after another.

I've not actually sat and really listened to the band in a long time, and Boi-ngo just reaffirms how awesome they were. Oingo Boingo never really broke wide open, but they skirted on the fringes of commercial success which was a pretty nifty trick for a band that was not commercial at all.

After all these years I still get a thrill out of listening to their music. You could say it's like being home again.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

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