Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
The new record from Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, is available online following a “pay what you want” strategy, although it seems modeled slightly more after NIN’s Ghosts than Radiohead’s In Rainbows: pay anything you want for high-quality, DRM-free mp3s. If you pay 5$ or more, you can get either mp3 or FLAC, and you can also download a single-file continuous mix of the album to get rid of those annoying split-second silences. For 10$ or more, all of the above plus a physical copy of the disc once it’s released. Also like Ghosts, the album is released under a Creative Commons license.
What about the album itself? As I write this I’m halfway through track 2, and I can say this: it sounds like Girl Talk, no doubt, but an older, smarter Girl Talk. A bit of background: 9 times out of 10, listening to a mashup track provokes a reaction like “wow, this is cool”, but nothing beyond that. There’s very rarely much subtlety to it, just the juxtaposition of two different styles in a mix that sometimes kind of works. Girl Talk’s 2006 album, Night Ripper, was a revelation: it weaved together dozens of samples into a whole new piece of work, and did so with subtlety and smarts. But Feed The Animals takes that to a whole new level (halfway through track 3 now). There are more samples here, way more samples. Seems like every 10 seconds brings a “hey, it’s that song” moment. And they don’t sound like they’re just thrown one on top of another, they flow together organically.
This confirms my opinion of Girl Talk as one of the most interesting artists working today, and while the top-40 hip-hop sound of a lot of the vocal tracks will make this unlistenable to a lot of people, I still recommend it to anyone who liked Night Ripper, and also to anyone who has never heard Girl Talk. If you didn’t like Night Ripper, though, this probably isn’t for you.
Update: I’ve now listened to the whole thing, and I’ve got to say, it’s a lot of fun. The snare patterns get a little repetitive towards the end, and it might be nice to have something a little down-tempo in there somewhere, but as it stands it’s another exhilarating ride through the past 50 years of popular music, in less than an hour. Highlight: a sample of Chuck D.’s vocals from Rebel Without A Pause on the song No Pause. Without the clatter of the Bomb Squad’s dense production, it puts the power of Chuck’s baritone in a whole new light. Great stuff.
Click here to get the album from Illegal Art (the label)
11 months ago