Albums

< Girl Talk
Feed The Animals
words by Mandy Drake

Woah! Was that a of second Busta Rhymes sampled next to Ini Kamoze’s ‘Hotstepper’? Jay Z mixed with Radiohead? Blackstreet tacked to The Band? Yep. And less of the ‘woah’. It’s petty tealeaf-ing as usual for Pittsburgh’s Girl Talk. Only it’s not all that petty… at least in places.

As you may or may not know, with Girl Talk, track names are irrelevant, so let’s not bother with them. Like it’s predecessor, 2007’s ‘Night Ripper’, the 14 songs on ‘Feed The Animals’ are papier-mâché’d together to make one almighty party pulp. Five seconds of Missy Elliot registers in one ear as a nano second of Outkast spitting “Foreva eva?” knocks it out from the other side, vanishing so quickly you end up questioning whether it even happened. It’s relentless, and sometimes extremely annoying, especially when you wanted to hear a little more of ‘Miss Jackson’. But in a glass-half-full happy ending, at least we don’t have to sit through enough of Avril Lavigne or ‘Come On Eileen’ to wind up needing to buy a new stereo. Because that’s what ‘Feed The Animals’ does: sits its strengths (reminding you of genre-spanning forgotten favourites that you should revisit in full) right next to its most heinous crimes (Avril Lavigne and ‘Come On Eileen’).

It’s all more than gimmicky (the theme from Dawson’s Creek snapping the needle on the cheese-o-meter), giving your average Reflex Bar frequenter a hard-on that could cause serious damage… and mess. But so intricate are the beats, samples and mixes (over fourteen tracks, literally hundreds of artists are pick-pocketed here) that you have to pay ‘Feed The Animals’ a begrudging respect. And the fact that it, like all Girl Talk records, is a completely illegal product is impossible to ignore. Girl Talk cares. He wants us to hear not just the hits, but the ‘good bits' of the hits, offal free and in very quick concession. He’ll risk doing time for it and spending endless hours dissecting pop, hip hop, rock and funk to create what he considers the ultimate mixtape for a house party. Arguably he needs to linger on some of the tracks he clearly loves for longer, controlling his scalpel hand, while going slash-happy on those tracks so obvious the irony wore off in 2002. But ‘Feed The Animals’ remains an album so clever that sampling can no longer be considered lazy, that's for sure.

6/10 in stores Sept 29th