Photos by Marley Hein
After three decades away from the road as a full-time rock performer, Danny Elfman’s Fall Tour doesn’t feel like a nostalgia act. Performing at The Fillmore Silver Spring on Monday night, Elfman took songs that have lived in people’s memories for decades and injected them with enough electricity, distortion and sheer volume to make them feel new and alive.
The room was buzzing when Elfman and his formidable band hit the stage. From the opening notes of “Sorry,” it was immediately apparent that this wasn’t going to be a polite trip down memory lane. Elfman prowled the stage, throwing himself into the music as the band unleashed a wall of sound around him. At one point, he grabbed a floor tom and pounded along with drummer Josh Freese, physically becoming part of the rhythm section. The sound was so massive, it matched the energy of the venue.
With the powerhouse band of Nine-Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck, Dethklok guitarist Nili Brosh, A Perfect Circle bassist Matt McJunkins, percussionist Dorothy Micklea and keyboardist Irene Kim alongside Freese, Elfman assembled a band capable of matching the theatrical scale of his music while giving the songs a harder, more contemporary edge.
The set immediately jumped between eras. “Insects” and “Nothing to Fear (But Fear Itself)” brought the manic energy of Oingo Boingo into the room, followed by newer material including “Native Intelligence,” “True,” “Sayonara” and “Happy.” The transitions were surprisingly natural. The eccentricity and rhythmic unpredictability of the Boingo material didn’t feel out of place next to the heavier industrial textures of Elfman’s solo work.
Visually, the stage became an extension of Elfman’s wonderfully strange musical universe. Images flashed across the large screens behind the band — beaches, spiders, distorted faces and surreal animated sequences — creating a constantly shifting backdrop that matched the unpredictable nature of the music. At times the visuals felt playful; at others, downright unsettling.
That combination of sound and imagery made songs such as “Sayonara” particularly effective. Sweeping, almost cinematic passages collided with distorted guitars and a disco-flavored pulse, creating the kind of musical collision that has become unmistakably Elfman. And then came the surprise.
As the opening strains of “This Is Halloween” filled the Fillmore, Elfman appeared in a black-and-white pinstripe jacket unmistakably reminiscent of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King from Tim Burton’s 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas. The audience immediately recognized the visual cue. But Elfman wasn’t interested in simply recreating the soundtrack version.
Instead, “This Is Halloween” was transformed into a dark, thunderous metal performance. The guitars came down hard, the rhythm section pushed the song into heavier territory, and footage from the film played behind the band. The familiar Halloween anthem suddenly sounded like it had wandered into a much darker corner of Halloween Town. It was one of those concert moments that could only happen at a Danny Elfman show.
The newer material provided another glimpse into where Elfman is headed. “Upside Down,” which had only recently made its live debut in Chicago, was part of a group of newer and unreleased songs that suggest his next musical chapter isn’t simply a return to Oingo Boingo.
“Monkeys on the Loose” was another standout, pairing Elfman’s mischievous musical instincts with bizarre and creepy imagery on the video screens. “Dance With the Lemurs” and “Kick Me” continued the unpredictable ride before the familiar opening notes of “Dead Man’s Party” sent the crowd into another level of celebration. By this point, the room was completely locked in.
Elfman brought the main set home with “In My Head,” followed by the one-two punch of Oingo Boingo’s “Only a Lad” and “No One Lives Forever.” The latter felt like the perfect release — a song built for a room full of people shouting along, dancing and celebrating Elfman’s return to the stage. The band eventually left, but the crowd wasn’t having it.
Elfman returned for an encore with “Who Do You Want to Be,” squeezing one final blast of Boingo energy out of the evening before the lights came up. The complete Silver Spring performance ran approximately 85 minutes, with 20 songs in the main set and the encore bringing the total to 21.
But the most impressive aspect of Elfman’s return isn’t simply that he can still perform these songs. It’s that he refuses to perform them as relics. The Oingo Boingo material retained its quirky, manic DNA, but the arrangements had a heavier muscle behind them. The newer songs demonstrated that Elfman isn’t merely looking backward, while the visual production gave the entire performance the cinematic quality audiences have come to expect from one of the most distinctive composers and musicians of his generation.
There was something almost surreal about watching Elfman move between these different chapters of his career in a single night — from the punkish chaos of Oingo Boingo to the industrial darkness of his solo work, from a brand-new song to “This Is Halloween”. The result was a concert that felt less like a reunion and more like a reintroduction. The songs were rebuilt and renewed — and at The Fillmore, they sounded very much alive.
FINAL GRADE: A
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