Album review: Weird Al Yankovic, Mandatory Fun

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23 Jul, 2014 05:00 PM3 mins to read

Weird Al Yankovic.

If anyone should be propping up the dole queue these days, it's "Weird Al" Yankovic.

At some stage in the last five years, his four-decade run of pop music mashups and comical covers should have been rendered obsolete by the rise of YouTube DIY bedroom comedy covers

But instead of considering a career change, Yankovic has spent the last couple of weeks on top of a viral tidal wave, thanks to his strategy of releasing eight songs with eight videos over eight days in the build up to the release of Mandatory Fun, the follow-up to 2011's Apocalypse that will reportedly be his last studio album.

It proves that 14 albums in, Yankovic has become very clever, and very adaptable, with what he does.

It helps that, like his 1998 Michael Jackson parody Fat or his 2009 rap hit White & Nerdy, Yankovic can still deliver a pisstake parody that's just plain genius.

There are two moments like that on Mandatory Fun, the first coming in the form of Word Crimes, a cover of Robin Thicke's oft-mocked Blurred Lines that spends four minutes raging against grammatical errors.

That it manages to rhyme words like "nomenclature" and "prepositions" while still remaining as catchy as all hell meant its accompanying YouTube clip grabbed 10 million views in a week, despite trainspotters pointing out a grammar error of Yankovic's own. The song is so clever it might have been included on purpose.

The second highlight is his reworking of Iggy Azalea's Fancy in an ode to handymen called Handy, the video for which includes bad moustaches, terrible animations, back-up dancers dressed as plumbers and lines like, "I'll rewire your house for fun, I've got 99 problems but a switch ain't one".

It's so stupid and simple you won't be able look away.

Elsewhere, things get a little hit-and-miss: First World Problems is a Pixies-style indie-rocker full of flat-lining digs at modern life, Foil takes on Lorde's Royals in an ode to tinfoil that gets dark around the halfway point, My Own Eyes tries to out-do the Foo Fighters but is too tinny to succeed, and Inactive turns Imagine Dragons' Radioactive into a forgettable ode about inertia.

Yes, there's one of those annoying polka medleys Yankovic likes to include on every album, a mashed-up disaster that compiles hits by Miley Cyrus, Foster the People and Psy into an annoying cartoon romp that you'll probably never want to listen to again.

And that's the problem with Mandatory Fun: it doesn't work as an album.

You can waste many minutes playing spot-the-celebrity during the entertaining video for Tacky, Yankovic's reworking of Pharrell's Happy. And the videos for Word Crimes and Handy deserve repeat viewing.

But trying to enjoy them as part of a "Weird Al" Yankovic CD in 2014 is exactly the kind of experience he seemed determined to avoid with his zeitgeist-grabbing video release innovation.

If Yankovic really is flagging albums away in future, you can only say it's the right move.