Girl Talk: All Day

Our rating:

For the first 10 seconds of Girl Talk’s latest release, All Day, you may think you are listening to the opening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album. The distinction is made shortly after, however, and you’ll quickly realize you are in for something completely different. For those who are unfamiliar with Girl Talk, he’s a mash-up DJ from Pittsburgh who has come to be pretty popular in the past few years.

Basically, he mixes together popular hip-hop songs with various pop and rock songs from all different time periods. The results are both fun and at times very interesting, as each of the songs presented in new contexts can feel quite different at times. For example, Girl Talk’s fusion of Birdman’s “Money to Blow” with the dramatic chorus of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” adds a whole new layer to a fairly bland hip-hop song about being rich and spending money

Girl Talk seems to always be able to find the perfect way to mesh a collection of songs that span across genres and time periods in a way that makes many of the overplayed party hits from the past five years suddenly seem fresh again. The anticipation of what he’s going to use next combined with the satisfaction of being able to pick out what songs are being pieced together is enough to bring a quick smile to your face . There’s also enough woven in the mix that with each repeated listen, you’ll find yourself picking up on things you may have missed before. The album, however, won’t be entertaining forever, as it is only a mash-up of already existing songs. His last release, 2008’s Feed the Animals, lasted me about a year before it lost most of its appeal. It is, then, good that we get a new release from him every few years. And as long as pop music continues to be made (I’m not anticipating any serious decline in the next few years), he should constantly have new material to work with and new things to mix together.

The album is, however, very similar to his previous projects, namely Feed the Animals and Night Ripper from 2004. There isn’t much to change, really, although Girl Talk tends to be using a lot of the same tricks he employed in the other albums. People who are as familiar with Feed the Animals (I was kind of obsessed with it for a few months straight) may notice that even uses the same artists or types of music at similar points in the album (He switched Jackson Five’s “ABC” from his 2008 release with their other classic, “I Want You Back,” on All Day). There isn’t much to distinguish his albums by, and although the mash-up style is fairly new, it will eventually become, if not already, fairly formulaic. The music is nonetheless a great way to re-listen to some of your old favorite songs in a very new way.

Overall, the album is fairly creative in its own right but, perhaps more importantly, it’s just really fun to listen to. It’s great music to drive to or play at a party (if you want it to be just a little hipper). With mash-up artists sprouting up left and right these days, it can get hard to weed out to good from the bad. It’s a type of music that can be done by an amateur fairly easily, and unfortunately a lot of the stuff you may stumble across on the web is pretty lousy. If you had to pick one mash-up artist to keep in your collection (that’s all you will ever really need), Girl Talk is a pretty safe choice in quality.

For those looking to check him out, which I highly recommend, his new album is up for free download on his website. He’s also coming to Philadelphia sometime next year, so keep your eyes posted for that.

-Mark Eisen

Listen to Mark’s RADIO SHOW Mondays at 1 pm on WQHS