Girl Talk’s 2006 breakthrough album Night Ripper was like a Where’s Waldo book for music geeks, an overstuffed treasure hunt loaded with Easter eggs. Girl Talk’s latest album, All Day, released for free download yesterday, is more like the large-print word search books my grandmother buys at the grocery store. Where Gregg Gillis once spliced samples into tiny, barely recognizable bits, he now pieces together long passages of unmistakable source material.
His craftsmanship is undeniableno other DJ is pulling off mixes this variedbut too often Gillis falls into the mash-up trap of playing contrasting pop and rap songs against each other for whimsy, a joke that wears thin especially fast when the songs don’t actually mesh that well. Fusing M.O.P.’s “Ante Up” with Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” or Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” with Radiohead’s “Creep” is the music equivalent of those Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer spoofs where Borat recites a catch phrase on the set of Chronicles of Narnia, or Wolverine punches Paris Hilton. Those movies rely on audiences simply congratulating themselves for picking up on very obvious pop-culture references. So does Girl Talk's new album.
