Customer Reviews

Skeletons in the Closet

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While I love Oingo Boingo (they have been my favorite band for the last 20 years). This is the CD I listen to the least. Don't get me wrong, on its own it is a great CD, but with all the other OB compilations available this one falls short.

Part of the problem was the band was splitting from one record label and moving to another. This CD was put out by the former record label in order to fulfill their contract with OB. Plus for any true OB fan this marks the beginning of the end for the band. After the release of "Skeletons" and "Boingo Alive", Danny Elfman (yes Jenna Elfman's uncle) concentrated on his music scores more than he did on the band. Thus releasing fewer new recordings.

If you are an avid OB fan and must have everything they own, get this CD. If this was going to be your first OB CD, get their "Anthology" CD. It is more complete.

This is the first Boingo CD I ever heard, and I can't wait to get more! (Of course, in Canada, Boingo CDs must be special imported from the US, making them hard to find.) This is a truly brilliant album, with great sweeping lyrics, pulse-pounding music, and a true sense of genuis. Elfman rules!

This particular release is amazing! There is not one bad song throughout the entire cd. It is one of those albums that you can listen to over and over again and never get tired of it....now that's what I call a great record.

For those of you who have never heard of Oingo Boingo, I would say they are a band that makes music that is almost impossible to describe. Their music is truly unique and is completely different from anything you've ever heard. Although there are a lot of bands that have their own sound, Oingo Boingo adds to their sound diversity by including the use of wind instruments. So I'll make an attempt and say Oingo Boingo is punk meets pop meets new wave meets brass meets weird, and that's about as close as I can get. So give them a listen, you won't be dissapointed.

Ok, so Oingo Boingo had more than 3 records for one thing for one to pick and choose songs from to make a best of record. I don't think A&M in the end if ever really wanted to put out a collection of fan favorites or get a music expert's opinion of what "the best" of these 3 records had to offer. With each listen it becomes apparant that the studio wanted a collection of songs that blended nicely together and this collection of songs does just that. I mean, each OB album from the early days' had its own appeal. Good For Your Soul had more of a regee feel, Nothing To Fear had more of a punk-pop feel and Only A Lad had more of a ska/new wave feel. So whatever mood you're in, you can find 10 songs that give into that/those desire(s)...but this collection finds a common ground between songs on each of those albums. So...if you're a fan of Oingo Boingo show your support by buying every Oingo Boingo album ever! But if you'd rather have just a solid music collection with no filler, then get this b/c it's a killer collection of songs by a killer band and it even has one of the best album covers ever! Yeah, there's other memorable and stimulating songs by this band, but I'd rather just stick with this record. OTher songs like "Perfect System" and "Running On Treadmill" are kinda lacking in relevance in my opinion. It's as if the band knew they had a cut off of how little they could put on a record so they (or most likely the producers) wrote what they could and chose the ones that had the best chance of "connecting" with the audience. Well, out of the 30 or or songs the producers chose on those albums, these are the the 12 they would have chosen if they would've waited...although that may have not been possible for various complex reasons...but like I said, if you think more is better then go ahead and buy more albums by this band. This collection is perfectly good for newcomers and just as well for those who simply have an astute taste in music.

I wish it had the hard to find original of Violent Love though. A nice complement to Best O'Boingo.

Awesome condition. You can tell it's used but hey, it's a cassette. Will buy from this guy in the future. Came quick and wasn't an issue whatsoever.

Great selection of songs! I really enjoyed their early stuff in the beginning and this compilation tells the story. If you listened to their first three albums in the early 80's, these are the best tracks from them.

this is a wonderful collection of O.B. songs. I already have two cds by them and this one just added more songs to my favorite song list. O.B. is amazing

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.

if you're a Danny Elfman fan, this sounds remastered into what he was originally looking for in the songs. not sped up by radio programmers, and not the normal radio hit collection, this is the perfect oingo album.