#332 E-603 - Torn Up

In anticipation of my upcoming date with Girl Talk, I went looking for other people doing similar stuff. As in, maximalist, busy, mashups, combining dozens of songs in various combinations, instead of stretching a two-song pairing to track length. When I've done this kind of search in the past, I've come away unimpressed with the stuff I've found, but this guy's sample track sounded promising, and hey, it's free! (get it here!).

It's impossible to talk about this album without talking about Girl Talk. These guys employ the same mix of rock and rap, with a similar samples-per-minute-rate. E-603 uses a lot of the same songs and even the album cover and title evoke Gregg Gillis's previous work. How does it compare then? Surprisingly favorably. Here's the main differences as I see them:

1) E-603 doesn't draw from quite as wide a selection of albums, focusing more squarely on indie rock and recent rap.

2) Where GT allows the rap and rock elements to share vocal duties, E-603 almost exclusively features rapping, with very little singing to be found. This makes the album as a whole blur together a bit more.

3) E-603 is a lot headphonier, more likely to make you bob your head than shake your ass.

And this comes to the major overriding difference between these guys. Gillis has honed his craft by putting on killer live shows; his focus is on making a party happen via music. E-603 is more focused on making music in its own right, and seems to take it a lot more seriously. It's not quite as much fun, and fun is, after all, what makes Girl Talk great. Also, this album lacks Girl Talk's mastery of pacing. It drags in places (feeling much longer than the actually-longer All Day), doesn't carve out high and low spaces as well as it should, and kind of just dies out at the end, rather than reaching a satisfying climax. Word is Gillis bristles at being called a DJ, but he has a DJ's mastery of mood, of pacing, of setting up and denying and fulfilling expectations about what's next, and it's something you don't miss until you hear an album that lacks it.

That said, this is still a really fun album, with some really gorgeous pairings that rival Girl Talk's finest moments (The M83, Ratatat, TPC and Closing Time samples come to mind, each perfectly utilized). E-603 also has a few new structural tricks up his sleeve. He sometimes returns to a sample used previously in the song (a move is strikingly absent from Girl Talk's steadfastly in-the-moment approach) and it works really nicely, and the weaving of related riffs through the second half of Hey Shorty is goddamned brilliant. Technically, it's solid, but are are some rough edges; there were at least a handful of places where the vocals are speed-adjusted clumsily, ending up logy, off-beat or distractingly distorted (see his take on Juicy on You Can Get) - so score one back for Girl Talk, whose albums are, if nothing else, perfectly executed on a technical level.

I do feel a bit guilty for talking about this album so squarely in Girl Talk terms, but its inescapable, the original mashup superstar's shadow looms large over every part of this album. And part of this is E-603's fault: it seems like, like so many of us, he heard Girl Talk and said "I could do that". Unlike the rest of us, he actually can. But he needs to expand on some of the divergences I mentioned, set up his own take on the style, before I can talk about his stuff wholly on its own terms. I look forward to that day, there's tons of potential on display here.

Again, its a super fun album, even if it comes up short on innovation and soul. One to watch, a new contender has arrived, squeaking in on the low end of 4.5/5