Entries from February 2009 ↓

“But seriously, you only cheat yourself if you cut corners with crappy guitar playing”

- from the “Duncan Hills Coffee Solo” instructional video

I picked this up after someone on NPR named it one of the best albums of 2008.  Girl Talk consists of a single person, Gregg Gillis, a mashup DJ.  Feed the Animals is a 14 track album that’s made up entirely of a wide variety of samples, from 1960s classic rock to modern pop and rap songs.

I normally don’t hear the albums that NPR names “best of” mainly because I’m in the car when I hear the story and promptly forget about the details by time I get home.  However, between the sound clips they played and the reviewer fawning over it, I thought I would give it a shot.

On first listen it’s very engaging.  I started off picking out the samples I could identify and everything sounded good mixed together.  As I listened to it some more I could see how the different samples come together.  I’ve had this about a month now and I still like it.

The thing is that I can’t really compare it to other more traditional music I buy.  Was this one of the best albums of 2008?  I really can’t say.  It’s certainly one of the most interesting ones, but can you hold this up to Death Magnetic or Tell Tale Signs and say that one is better than the other?  They just seem too different to compare.

According to the Wikipedia entry this was originally supposed to be one constant stream which makes more sense than the format it ended up coming out in.  There’s something strange about how the album is broken out into songs.  They’re not songs in the traditional sense in that there’s some kind of thread running through them.  The songs end up being arbitrary breaks in the samples.

The thing I keep wondering about is how I’ll feel about this down the road, one year or five years from now.  Will it just seem like a gimmicky thing or will this album (or one like it) become a classic?  I’m leaning toward the former, but I’ve been wrong a lot in my life so who knows.

Feed the Animals is available as a name-your-price download here.  If you pay more than $10 you’re supposed to get a physical copy but I’ve never seen any update saying it’s actually been released or not.