Only a Lad (Reissue)

If it had come out even five years earlier, Only a Lad might have been relegated to the pop music fringes. Thankfully, by the album’s 1981 release date, the world was catching up to the effervescent musicality of Oingo Boingo, a band that had existed since 1972. Though it seemed to epitomize the meteoric rise of new wave, Oingo Boingo was anything but a flash in the pan. Danny Elfman had spent his 20s studying avant-garde and African music traditions, and that knowledge bleeds into the songs on Only a Lad. “Little Girls,” “Only a Lad,” and “Nasty Habits” are good old-fashioned bar-rock tunes spring-loaded with third-wave ska, screwball instrumentation, and the kind of virtuosic mischief that had long been Frank Zappa’s stock in trade. This wealth of ideas might have collapsed in the hands of lesser bands, but Boingo’s secret was its limitless vigor. Rather than let ambitions weigh things down, the band used them like caffeine—and the album ends up feeling amazingly youthful and animated, given that Elfman was pushing 30 by the time it was released.