Gregg Gillis spent Night Ripper, his 2006 album recorded
as Girl Talk, scrambling dozens of recent pop and hip-hop hits (along with
innumerable older songs) into a stew that shifts without warning from one
ridiculous combo to another. This fascinated people, for good reason: Gillis
has a real gift for juxtaposition, and his constructs moved even as they
shifted from rhythm to rhythm. That's still the case on Feed The Animals, the fourth overall Girl
Talk album and the second to garner a large audience. It's more of the same,
all right: old plus new, rock/pop plus hip-hop, expected plus unexpected.
Gillis' technique is even more technically impressive than before: Animals shows even fewer seams
than Night Ripper did,
with Gillis road-testing many of his joins at shows before tightening the screws
for the final result. (Animals was made available recently as a pay-what-you-like
download from IllegalArt.net.)
It's also dizzier than its predecessor. There are
moments where Gillis would be better off letting things ride out a little more,
especially when he finds a particularly inspired pairing, like Busta Rhymes
over Yo La Tengo ("Like This"), Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" over The Guess
Who's "These Eyes" ("Set It Off"), or Blackstreet's "No Diggity" over Kanye
West's "Flashing Lights" ("Still Here"). Still, Gillis' sense of sonic
proportion gives the whole mix a curvaceousness that make even the most
unnatural tandems seem perfectly logical. At the very least, it's a lot more
enjoyable than most of the clips programs on VH-1.