'Boos' album is real boo-boo

"Boo!" That's what you expect to hear from little goblins and ghosts that come to your door on Halloween.

But you will also want to say "Boo" when you listen to a little Halloween CD called "Dr. Elmo Sings the Boos."

Does that album live up to its title.

The songs on the disc make up a scary collection of music that is written and produced by Rita Abrams and Elmo Shropshire and arranged and performed by keyboardist/vocalist Frank "Killer Bee" Martin, multi-instrumentalist Gary Potterton and keyboardist Reed Fromer.

I don't mean scary in a vampire sort of way. I mean scary in a not-very-good sort of way. In fact, if you were a vampire, you'd say this album sucks.

I give the CD points for trying to do something clever for the purpose of making Halloween fun, but it loses whatever positive elements it accumulated because the songs are evil and should be burned at the stake.

By evil, I don't mean backward Satanic messages. I mean the opposite of good.

"Redneck Dracula," one of the more popular tunes from the album, begins a bit like Bobby "Boris" Pickett's classic "Monster Mash." While it may be an homage, "Redneck Dracula" makes you yearn for "Monster Mash," if only to get the other song out of your head.

The album tries to be crafty. Songs like "The Fly," "The Scariest Thing I'll Ever Do" and "Texas Chainsaw Halloween" address classic horror themes, giving them a little punch-line twist. The problem, however, is that the blandness of the songs far outweighs the impact of the punch lines.

Simply put, this album is hard to get through. It's like water torture for the ears. The more you hear, the more they aggravate.

Even my two daughters, ages 12 and 9, told me to turn off the CD when we took it for a spin during a drive.

It's scary when novelty songs aimed at the young insult the intelligence of the young.

And if you survive the first few songs, the others aren't any better. "Pointy, the Pyramid Pumpkin," "Haunted Hoedown," Party Arty," "The Witch and the Toad," "Global Warmin' " and "Bad Black Cat" send chills up the spine. And sometimes you can't help but make a monstrous face, as if you had mistakenly sipped a cup of distilled vinegar, thinking it was water.

If you want to get a nice Halloween CD, track down "Halloween Hits," released by Rhino Records in 1991. The track list includes Pickett's "Monster Mash," Sheb Wooley's "Purple People Eater," Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You," the themes from "The Twilight Zone," "The Addams Family," "Ghostbusters" and the John Carpenter film "Halloween."

Leave "Dr. Elmo Sings the Boos" in its case.

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com