THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409180091
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Music review
SOURCE: BY SUE SMALLWOOD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
Is that Boingo onstage or some scruffy opening act? Welcome to the no-frills '90s. Yeah, the adolescent-looking guy sporting a baggy T-shirt, shorts and unruly red mop top is Danny Elfman, esteemed film composer and, for these past 15 years, Boingo mastermind.
With ``Boingo,'' the band's first studio album in four years, singer/songwriter/guitarist Elfman shortened the band's moniker from Oingo Boingo, bagged his longtime horn section and deepened, darkened and roughened the sound. That's good and bad.
Battling a murky mess of a sound mix, Elfman and company pulled off a set Thursday in Norfolk that seemed almost destined to fail. For nearly all of the first half of their two-hour performance, the now six-man Boingo looked and sounded disheveled, a truly alarming development coming from an ensemble legendary for its onstage synchronicity and showmanship and impossibly perfect studio confections.
The evening's merciful turning point was a stunning string of Beatles-inflected material from the new album: The gorgeously melancholic ``Mary,'' the trippy ``Change'' (which vacillated from an easy swing to a languorous groove, then rode out on an electric coda), and a thundering cover of ``I Am The Walrus.''
Undermixed keyboards kicked in a cartwheeling xylophone bed, a Boingo trademark, behind the ominous ``Insanity.'' Looming orchestral tones reminiscent of Elfman's Grammy-grabbing ``Batman'' score created dramatic tension; the song climaxed with Elfman pounding maniacally on a pair of congas, a devilish grin pasted across his face. It was the evening's highlight.
During a crowd-sating encore of blitzkrieg Boingo favorites, Elfman and shirtless bassist John Avila broke out the real thing for a galloping ``Gray Matter,'' both gleefully banging out breakneck rhythms on oddly curved and canted. by CNB