Dryvetyme Onlyne

Junk Culture
West Coast
Illegal Art; 2009

Hipsters of all stripes (along with the occasional music critic) have been enjoying the music of Girl Talk for the past few years as sampling wunderkind Greg Gillis has wowed our ears with the album-length dance parties Night Ripper and Feed The Animals. Gillis’ skill at manipulating sound and music (without breaking musical copyright laws) is almost without peer, but more importantly, he also manages to get white people to actually listen to the rap, R&B, and hip-hop that they claim to love (but really don’t possess in their iTunes libraries). Well, it seems that he’s found a bit of an understudy, contemporary, and/or protégé (depending upon your definition) in the person of Deepak Mantena, aka Junk Culture. The twist here is that, instead of tweaking, bending, and re-shaping hordes of various song snippets (both current and classic), Junk Culture thrives on collecting and collating sundry sound samples and then refashioning them into thriving instrumental jams.

The result is West Coast, a nine-song debut EP that runs for just over eighteen minutes long, but achieves its intended goal of getting my fat white ass out of my chair and boogieing around my apartment. Chunks of hip-hop, funk, soul, danceable electro-pop, and dub-ish dancehall are fused together with a deep punk sensibility, giving the entire effort an intense, irrepressible, and kinetic energy. These songs come across as sort of a musical one-act play: there are the three key songs that carry forth the themes and motifs of the project (“West Coast,” “That’s Not Me,” and “Carmel Valley Girls”), while the other six are akin to brief, passionate vignettes or monologues that tie connect everything together.

Granted, there are times when I find those short tracks to be somewhat frustrating in that I either wanted each one expanded into a more well-rounded selection or hear them combined into one or two coherent cuts of their own. Also, I wonder if the sonic aesthetic of Junk Culture can be sustained and transformed into the sort of vibrant stage show that Girl Talk has cultivated. That being said, West Coast is an insanely catchy record packed with heaps of aural glee. If Mantena can keep creating music of this sort and do so with any sort of regularity, the dancing machine I keep locked away inside my soul might come out to play more often. Who needs a 45-minute-long record every two years or so if Junk Culture can work up a tasty 15-to-20-minute-long EP every 6 months?