All Day

Pop enthusiast/mash-up master Gregg Gillis fine-tunes his approach for All Day, a mix that took over two and a half years to craft. Each outing in Girl Talk's discography has followed a steady succession, starting with Secret Diary's microscopic, glitch-based work and becoming progressively less fractured with every release. Following suit, All Day is Gillis' straightest work to date. After the success of Night Ripper and his masterpiece Feed the Animals, steady club touring helped him exercise his lap-top chops, and now -- armed with greater software know-how and a precisely organized hard drive of successfully road-tested MP3s -- his fifth album has fewer moments that feel random or forced. Here, Gillis makes blending gangsta rap and classic pop feel easy. Because All Day isn’t as dense or frenetic as Feed the Animals, it plays a little more like a party album than a game of Name That Tune for music buffs. Still, it is absolutely jam-packed. With 373 samples in 71 minutes, the songs are so cleverly and seamlessly collaged together that things become practically comical: Ludacris’ “How Low” over Phoenix’s “1901,“ Crooked I’s "Everything" over Neil Diamond’s “Cherry Cherry,” Ice Cube’s ”It Was a Good Day” over Devo’s “Gates of Steel," and Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” over Joe Jackson's "Steppin’ Out" are just a smattering of artists featured in the first few minutes of a single track. All Day is too playful to be considered mature, but for the first time it feels like a consistent album and there are definite signs of Girl Talk maturing as an artist. Above all, it's a whole lot of fun. ~ Jason Lymangrover