B+

Girl Talk: All Day

By Spencer Kornhaber | November 30, 2010 | 6:43am

Music Reviews Music

On paper, albums by the party-owning cut-and-paste DJ Girl Talk exist for instant gratification: There’s the grin-inducing spot-the-samples game (i.e.: “Shiiit, M.O.P. murder vows ladled over ‘Party In The U.S.A.?’”), and there’s also the fact that the entire mega-mash-up is stupendously danceable. But to an even greater extent than with Greg Gillis’ past two blockbusters, All Day’s real pleasures come once the listener has mastered the album’s geography and cleverly constructed internal logic. The key pairings coast longer than before, and the patience often pays off: Phoenix’s “1901,” for example, plays with Ludacris’ “How Low” for nearly a full minute before getting to the punchline, when Thomas Mars and Luda deliver choruses about two diverse kinds of downward motion.

All Day is just a refinement of Gillis’ technique. The samples are somehow more karaoke-machine-universal than ever. (Where was “Don’t Fear The Reaper” until now?) The songs increasingly pivot between suites instead of stumbling herky-jerkily from one to another. But Gillis remains Gillis, and the takeaway from All Day is as thrillingly tasteless and exhaustingly detailed as ever. He courts blasphemy by concluding with John Lennon’s “Imagine,” but this, too, is a punchline: Through Girl Talk, we need no imagination to envision all the people living as one.