Pop Music Reviews : A Thinking Man’s Party With Oingo Boingo

How appropriate that technical difficulties interrupted Oingo Boingo’s Universal Amphitheatre show on Sunday during the song “Grey Matter.” Leader Danny Elfman is the kind of artist who uses his noggin a bit too much. His message (essentially “Think for yourself”) could be conveyed just fine on the strength of the band’s distinctive music. But many of his songs take on big questions in a big way that gets a little relentless at times.

Of course, it’s better to ask your fans to think too much than not at all. But the 2 1/2-hour show that started with “Dead Man’s Party” ( “los muertos “ is a lyric and graphic obsession for Boingo) seemed more like “dead man’s ruminations” for a while. Matters of mortality and meaning were cast at listeners’ brains, with only a few morsels heading to the feet. Until the technical difficulties, that is. After a little ensemble yodeling to fill the time, the band launched into “Grey Matter” again, and from then on the show seemed looser and lighter, equally stimulating to brain and foot.

The show--the first of four sold-out dates, continuing tonight through Thursday--also proved that just because Elfman is now doing all those highfalutin Hollywood film scores, he hasn’t lost touch with his core audience. And it doesn’t come any harder-core than the KROQ-nurtured hometown crowd. “You’re going to make us play the silly ones, aren’t you?” he asked halfway through an encore set that only seemed silly in the Boingo context. But what the hey? Nothing to cap off a hard day of serious philosophizing like a little recreational thinking.