Poodle Hat

Weird Al for me is paramount to my early days on the 'net, which would ultimately lead me to here... writing this review, on this platform for you to read. So, thanks Al?

OK some explanation, no Al didn't bust through my front door accordion in hands and give me a fun lesson on safe web browsing, no instead I encountered Al on one of those really obscure flash-farm websites. You know the type, like Newgrounds, but not Newgrounds but a site that "probably" stole content from Newgrounds. Either way, I recall that I would often in that naive way so many of us used the internet just type words into the address bar, followed by the classic .com. Of course, being an unstimulated tween I'd often type bored and then .com; and it was from here that I found so many early relics of the internet, what I guess the zoomers would call "dank memes" now. And within these dank memes I found animated music videos for many silly songs, which by no surprise were often penned by our lord and savior of musical comedy, Weird Al.

It would be from this website that I would listen to eBay and A Complicated Song over and over and over and over again. Many of these songs would become ingrained into my tween brain, to the point that even when I heard the real songs years later I'd be mixing the lyrics between the original and the parody. Of course then came the MP3 player ownership and the Limewire "abuse" and it was a given that these songs would soon make it onto my devices for listening at school.

Once I had finally upgraded to a "big boy" MP3 player with a screen (not an iPod, but a Creative Zen, ooooh!) I would begin my photo-association with songs; wherein I recognise the albums artwork quicker than the albums title. This, er, "talent", is still with me to this day and certainly helps me flick through racks of CDs and records at a semi-decent pace, which isn't too bad considering the size of my collection. But in 2019, while trying to clear-up by music collection (aided of course by MusicBrainz, although unknowingly at the time) I came across my sporadic collection of Weird Al songs. I was in a phase where I wanted to remove the random, lonely, and low-quality MP3s from my library, focusing on a more mature album driven collection; so many of Al's songs went into a folder along with various TV themes, odd bits of soundtracks and one-hit-wonders to be forgotten about.

As I've been trying to reduce the amount of pointless data hoarding I often encounter, I found this folder and began to reminisce. I came across my copy of "eBay.mp3" and all the memories came back to me; "I really should listen to a Weird Al album" I thought, "not just a compilation or watch the occassional music video a full length album, certainly as he's said he won't make anymore". So today I spun up ye olde Spotify and located "Poodle Hat" for its first ever end-to-end listen.

It's not considered to be Al's best from what I gather from online review aggregators, and I can see why. You'd think that Couch Potato, a parody of the ever popular Eminem (and his track Lose Yourself), being the first track would really hit it out of the park but it just didn't really do it for me. However things really picked up the pace with track 2, Hardware Store and according to the listening stats you can see that many people seem to go straight for track 2. Al's lyrical gymnastics really flourish here, and the general pace of the song get's you really going. However the album isn't smooth sailing, Party at the Leper Colony for me was another dud which is then followed by another one of Al's beautiful Polka's (this one an aptly named Angry White Boy Polka, and being an angry white boy I recognize all the songs included). This pattern of low-high seems to continue with track 6 being a weird Jamiroqai styled smooth jam that leaves no lasting impression, to be blown out of the water by "A Complicated Song" (parody of Complciated by Avril Lavigne). Again things repeat with track 8-9 and 10-11.

In a way this might have been done on purpose, this is still from the era of buying CD's (2003) and thus listening to things "in sequence" and to stop people from ejecting the mirrored disc and launching it into a nearby hedgerow or throwing it into the McDonald's parking lot trash-can, it was decided to pair every strong song with a weaker one... people do like rollercoasters.

These days I feel that Al would probably have just cut those lesser songs out, and released a much shorter album, possibly even an EP. But with his decision to never release an album again, they'd probably just be standalone recordings, standing tall and proud.

So for this, Poodle Hat maybe isn't as bad as some make it out to be, it's clearly not the strongest album to exist but when it's good, it's really good.