Girl Talk Unstoppable CD

The first album by Girl Talk, aka DJ Gregg Gillis, was like a club-oriented version of John Oswald's Plunderphonics, filled with bits of familiar pop songs that were mostly teasingly too short and too sonically manipulated to fully grasp. Unstoppable, on the other hand, is more like an album-length mash-up as created by a well-stocked DJ with both ADHD and a wicked sense of humor. The samples on Unstoppable are nose-thumbingly blatant in the manner of the classic early KLF singles, but they're far more expertly mixed, and they come from a wider frame of reference that includes Lisa Loeb's "Stay" next to crunchy Bon Jovi power chords. But what's most remarkable about Unstoppable is how the samples are never the whole point of the album: Gillis folds, spindles, and mutilates these bits and pieces of musical memory into entirely new songs with hooks, lyrics, and grooves of their own; before "Pump It Up," who knew that the piano riff from Coldplay's "Clocks" could rock so hard? Great fun for trainspotters, sure, but the true delight of songs like "Cleveland, Shake" and "Touch 2 Feel" is that they're exhilarating dance music. ~ Stewart Mason