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Girl Talk, aka 26 year-old Pittsburgh native Greg Gillis, has a new album called Feed The Animals out and at the moment it’s only available on a “pay-what-you-like” basis via his label, Illegal Art. Or you can pay $10 to receive a hard copy of the album when it has a physical release on September 23.

Back to the PWYW model though - in this instance, users that choose to pay nothing to acquire the music have to explain why, selecting “I may donate later”, “I can’t afford to pay”, “I don’t believe in paying for music”, “I don’t value music made from sampling”, etc. as their reasoning.

Girl Talk specializes in sample-based remixes and mashups - he plucks elements from at least a dozen existing songs, from old to new, to create a “new” song. In any given song you might hear an excerpt of Lil Mama, LL Cool J, Lily Allen, whoever. Songs that have been out for 20 years and others that haven’t even been released as proper singles yet.

This is Girl Talk’s fourth album and I love that he’s (thus far) adhered to a solid schedule of releasing an album every even-numbered year since 2002. Extra points for consistency.

Warning: the album is highly infectious. Everyone knows that one of the hallmarks of a great DJ is playing a healthy combination of songs people know interspersed with new or more obscure stuff that no one’s heard of. Do too much of the latter, and you’ll lose everyone’s attention. And if you have a short attention span (really, who doesn’t?) you’ll adore this album even more…just when you’re aching for a change in melody, the song switches. It’s hard to tell when one song ends and another ends - there are just TOO many good combos on this album.

It’s a trip down nostalgia lane for sure - every 20 seconds you’ll hear yourself exclaim “hey, I totally know this song!” (wouldn’t it be a fun exercise to try to guess them all?? Plus, it really drives you to go research some of the songs you’ve heard snippets of to hear more!

As a bonus, Wikipedia just happens to have a breakdown of the over 350 songs used on the album’s 14 tracks.

Links:
MySpace: Girl Talk

Posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm by Kat and is filed under MuchRadar.

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