Girl Talk, Night Ripper
The most bonkers mash-up album ever
Most of the time, blend-mixes, beat collages, mash-ups or whatever they're being called this year are made more or less straightforwardly: Lay the vocals of one song over the music of another — an A-B mix, as it's sometimes called — and bang, instant culture-clash. Slightly rarer are mixmasters who array a whole bunch of snippets in rapid succession not to disjunctive effect but to build a groove. That's where Greg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, comes in. On Night Ripper, his third album of plundered sonics, Gillis makes off with pretty much every corner of the Top 40 from the past three decades, with special emphasis on recent stuff, as when he mixes M.I.A.'s "Galang" with Amerie's "1 Thing" on "Summer Smoke" or drops Lady Sovereign atop Nikka Costa's funkiest track on "Friday Night." And if you get sick of any of it, just wait about ten seconds, because Gillis seems to have designed his tracks for maximum ADD-addled enjoyment. But his cuts-and-pastes are crafted so meticulously that they move even after you've gotten past the initial shock value of a cut like "Bounce That" (Annie meet Fergie — and say hello to your cousins in Kansas). Gimmicky? Sure. Fun? Hoo-boy, yes.
