Dancing at the Zoo
Girl Talk proves he knows what us animals are hungry for.
Girl Talk
Feed The Animals
Released on Jun 19, 2008
It seems like the majority of music coming out these days stems from Woody Allen types. Obsessed with personal neuroses, constantly self-involved and self-deprecating, the work that results is interesting, but can lack a certain amount of a long-forgotten element for twenty-somethings: Fun.
Girl Talk (a.k.a. Greg Gillis) refuses the denial of such an integral building block. He's just released his follow up to the magnitudinous Night Ripper that drew an entire culture of underground (almost ashamed) pop-fans out from the closet and into the club. He even drew this particular critic to waiting outside in a surprisingly cold L.A. for four hours just to see him perform at The Echo (ironically, across the street from the Elliott Smith Figure 8 wall).
Standing outside in a chilly forty degrees surrounded by coked-out L.A. locals in front of a wall that brings to mind the most awkward Grammy performance ever might be the best way to describe Girl Talk's sound. It's everything you want to hear in pop music shoved together into some strange new, oddly moving and completely familiar form.
With a cover exhibiting a suburban home with a lawn aflame with the letters "GT", the album promises to be as inviting as it is shocking and destructive. Indeed, the obsessively attention-deficit, contentedly bending tempo of Feed The Animals exhibits tracks that you'll be familiar with (from "Come on Eileen" to Avril's "Girlfriend") and throws them against the backing sounds of anything in pop consciousness, from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead.
The whole album strings along as fluidly as Night Ripper did, making it the perfect addition in whole to your "Party Time" play list. Unlike the previous album, however, Gillis has gone ahead and begun using much longer samples with slightly more 70's rhythms. This doesn't just make the album more inviting to a "less-comfortable-on-the-dance-floor" audience, but it makes the cuts between tracks a lot cleaner. The result: where Ripper's individual tracks made you feel like you were missing the beginning and ending to movements, these equally distributed works (all between 2:58 and 4:46) stand alone as songs as well as flowing together without interruption.
Feed The Animals takes the listener from one end of the evening to the other, book ended by the over the top tracks, "Play Your Part (pt. 1 & 2)" and moving through forty years of music while hardly losing any momentum, keeping even the most awkward of scenesters on the dance floor. Woody, come out of the cave. All you L.A. kids, stop writing on the wall and crying. Come across the street. You're all animals and Girl Talk is back to shove the fun (however ephemeral) down your ears and into those toe-tapping feet.
High Point
"Give Me A Beat" features a moment where Tom Petty's "American Girl" has Fatman Scoop and Timbaland rapping over it. The combination of corn-fed goodness with a chant of "Bend over! Bend over!" is nothing short of hilarious and incredibly triumphant.
Low Point
"Soulja Boy" is now officially the "Chucky" of pop music. You always think that a sample from him will work well, but it just makes your ears feel like they're being crushed in a trash compactor.
Posted by Mark Steffen on Jun 24, 2008 @ 6:29 am
