Pledge Music (2017)
Over the past few months I've gone through Weird Al's entire catalog of full length albums that were part of his Squeeze Box set. We've made it to the last LP, which is exclusive to this set, Medium Rarities. This is a compilation of various unreleased or under-released songs from Al's catalog over the past thirty years or so. There's some real gems in here for sure.
The songs are arranged in a rough chronological order and unsurprisingly, my favorites tend to be towards the beginning of the record. There are super early versions of "My Bologna" and "Yoda" that are not as polished as the final versions, but these are slower renditions that are primarily fueled by the accordion. "Pac Man" is a previously unreleased parody of "Tax Man" and is as strong as anything on Weird Al's debut, my person favorite record of his.
From there we go into some oddities such as an instrumental version of "Dare To Be Stupid" and a version of "Jurassic Park" that's sung in Japanese. There's a bunch of songs from TV shows that Al contributed to like The Simpsons, 30 Rock and Comedy Bang Bang, though these tend to be pretty short, likely due to the confines of TV. The album closes with an updated version of "Happy Birthday" that's a little bit slower than the original and not as energetic. It's also seriously lacking accordion.
I really do love this record, but I think I would love it even more if it focused more heavily on Al's early, more formative years. I'm sure those songs aren't Al's favorites to listen to all of this time later, but they are the ones that I find most intriguing. After all of this time, the world really needs an officially released version of "It's Still Billy Joel To Me."
"Weird Al" Yankovic - "Yoda (Demo)":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1OkLbFx9Wk
"Weird Al" Yankovic - "Pac Man":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlU60vGRVHc
Why can't it be on iTunes?
ReplyDeletePlease answer me.