THE BOOMTOWN RATS : MONDO BONGO

1. Mood Mambo
2. Straight Up
3. This Is My Room
4. Another Piece Of Red
5. Go Man Go
6. Under Their Thumb Is Under My Thumb
7. Please Don't Go
8. The Elephants Graveyard
9. Banana Republic
10. Fall Down
11. Hurt Hurts
12. Whitehall 1212
    Hidden track :
13. Cheerio

Label : Mercury

Length : 53:28

Release Date : December 1980

Review (AllMusic) : On their fourth album, the Boomtown Rats submitted to ambitiousness, with singer Bob Geldof attempting to assume the mantle of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, while the band tried to keep up with musical fashions in Britain. The combination led to such oddities as a ska-beat rewrite of the Stones' "Under My Thumb" and a couple of side-opening mambos. The band was at its best when it returned to the pop music that was its core on such songs as the Buddy Holly-ish "Don't Talk to Me" and especially the danceable "Up All Night," but they were buried on the second side of an uneven collection that made the Rats' sense of direction seem uncertain.

Review (Wikipedia) : Mondo Bongo was the Boomtown Rats' fourth album. It peaked at No. 6 in the UK Albums Chart in February 1981, and No. 116 in the US Billboard 200. This is the band's last album to be recorded as six-piece band, as the guitarist Gerry Cott left the band shortly after the album's release. It included the hit singles: "Banana Republic", which had reached No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart in November 1980 and "The Elephants Graveyard (Guilty)" which made No. 26 in January 1981. The album received mixed reviews in the press, with American critics being generally more positive than their British counterparts. New Musical Express put down the record as "hollow pop, quaking under a plethora of poorly integrated rip-offs", while Sounds called it "self-indulgent" and lacking in depth or emotion. Rolling Stone, however, praised it as "an intoxicating mixture of pop and punk", and Trouser Press called it "an enormously enjoyable LP, with hardly a dry patch on it".