Album Review: Boo! by Was (Not Was)

Few pop-rock songwriters are prepared to address modern life in all its rancid, dysfunctional glory. Fewer still can frame their lyrics in music that doesn't rot your teeth. But Don and David Was have done this since the 1980s, and middle age suits them just fine. Boo!, their first album for 16 years, is well up to the standard of classics such as What Up Dog? and Are You Okay? Vocalists Harry Bowens, Sweet Pea Atkinson and Donald Ray Mitchell deliver the skewed tales of It's a Miracle, From the Head to the Heart and Crazy Water with ferocious soulfulness.

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At the beginning of the '80s, David and Don Was weren't gathering bedfellows as strange as Ozzy Osborne and Mel Tormé -- as they would a few years later, seemingly inspired by the P-Funk All Stars as much as Battle of the Network Stars -- but the Oak Park, MI, natives were nonetheless generating collaborations as unlikely and successful as Brian Eno before them. (Partial roll call: MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, Mingus associate Marcus Belgrave, and future Eminem accomplice Luis Resto, along with regular vocalists Sweet Pea Atkinson and Sir Harry Bowens. ) In fact, prior to crossing over into a realm of silliness not unfamiliar to Weird Al, the Was brothers and company made some of the baddest, strangest disco-funk imaginable.

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