Oingo Boingo - Dark At The End Of The Tunnel

One of their greatest albums

I personally love this album. I would consider it only second to Dead Man's Party. The highlights of the album are "Try To Believe", "Long Breakdown", "Is This", and "Glory Be". There are a few songs that I don't care for, but I always feel that way about most every album out there. I think that if you're more into their ska sound froma lbums like Nothing To Fear and Only A Lad you may be dissastisfied with this. However, if you prefer the more pop sound of albums like Dead Man's Party and So-Lo (which is an Oingo Boingo album labeled as a Danny Elfman album), you will enjoy this more. These songs sound much more like something you would hear being played on the radio than their early 80's stuff. December 5, 2008

A Voice of Reason

I am a huge fan of Oingo Boingo and I am not from the west coast. I discovered the band in 1983 and listened to them at least once a week for about a decade. I own everything they've ever released, in addition to some unreleased demos. They are my favorite band of all time and I am grateful every day for their music. So I am a geek for this band. I hope I've made that clear.

I have a theory about Amazon reviews, which is that most people don't review albums they don't like. It's unfortunate, because it puts the reviews and ratings completely out of balance. Basically, you'd be hard pressed to find an album that has received a large number of negative reviews (I challenge you to find an album with 10+ reviews, where at least 6 of them are not positive).

My advice: Unless you are a Boingo geek, like me, and must own it all, there is no reason to own this album. It is by far the worst in their catalog. When I bought it the week it was originally released, I was so excited to see the cool artwork on the cover (especially after the 80s paint-streaked cover of the preceding release,"BOI-NGO"). I was a bit disappointed with their previous album's sound - a bit too tame. There were some great songs on it, though. And the artwork of "Dark. . ." tricked me into believing this one would find the band back to their unique, weird sound I'd loved on their earlier releases.

Well, upon hearing the disk for the first time I was blown away by how awful it sounded. Oingo Boingo always had a heavily produced sound. And for me they were brilliant at walking the fine line between brilliant and cheesy (although most of my friends in North Carolina only heard cheese). But "Dark. . ." just sucked. Maybe they were feeling label pressure for another hit record like, "Dead Man's Party," or possibly they were trying to make a transition into the '90s. Whatever the reason, this album sounded the least like Oingo Boingo to me. I finally understood why my friends laughed at me for liking this band. This album was awful.

The promotional photos on the inside of the CD jacket showed the band dressed in cowboy shirts - Danny had a bolo - and they did not look cool at all. They looked like sales associates at Circuit City. What the hell happened?

Steer clear of this release. Get Nothing to Fear or Good For Your Soul or any other Oingo Boingo release than this one.

I think the folks who are giving positive reviews to this disk are either too young to know what Oingo Boingo is about and they're into really mainstream pop stuff like old Paula Abdul or they had a bad trip at one of the legendary Boingo Halloween Christmas shows in LA and have lost their sense of musical taste. Regardless, this is a bad album.

But, with all of that said, a bad Oingo Boingo disk is still not the worst musical purchase you could make (assuming you have the rest of their amazing catalog).

Enter this "tunnel" at your own risk. January 23, 2008

Dark at the End of the Tunnel

This CD brings back alot of memories and is a ton of fun to listen too. Getting my kids a taste of some cool music from my day and they love it. My 4 year old sings it in the car and around the house. Lots of fun and Danny Elfman's voice is HOT :) January 18, 2008

The worst Oingo Boingo album

The album cover sucks. The songs are absolutely pointless from the angle of both melody and lyric. Try To Believe, Right To Know, Run Away, Long Breakdown - these all repeat lyrics over and over and over and over...you get the idea. The only things worth anything on this album are Skin and Out of Control. May 15, 2006

The WORST Boingo CD

I am blown away seeing all these 4-star and 5-star ratings for this CD. This is Boingo's absolute worst CD. When I make a best songs compilation, I skip right over it. A couple of songs are just "OK" (Skin, Flesh n' Blood, When the Lights go Out) and that's about it. If you are interested in Boingo, the best album is Nothing to Fear, with Good for Your Soul and Dead Man's Party a very close second. November 15, 2005

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