It wasn’t that long ago that a casual reference to “LARPing” would instantly get you banished to the dorkiest table at the cafeteria. If only those kids could have known that one day, “side quest” would just as commonly describe a trip to score ketamine as an opportunity to bust out the 20-sided dice. Chris Taylor’s always managed to split the difference, juggling the sleek pop sensibilities of a club-hopper with the type of obsessive engineering that only comes from late nights spent burying your head in software. That contrast lives in his music as Body Meat: Blake-ian vocal hooks get chopped up against mutant MIDI rhythms partway between Nyege Nyege and Nobuo Uematsu, and no cartoonishly obtuse sound is too stiff to loosen up into an elastic excuse to dance.
Starchris, Body Meat’s long-awaited full-length debut, makes it seem as if all the various genres and sounds currently percolating through our world might’ve been secretly emanating from his all along. Rage beats tumble into hyperspeed rave-ups; post-SOPHIE sound design squiggles alongside mangled Afrobeats and teeth-gnashing nu-metal. It’s the kind of genre-splitting that’s become a hallmark of hyperpop, but Starchris never comes off like a gimmicky mashup. Instead, Taylor explores what these styles have in common: how competing bass patterns can interlock, the way a slight vocal tic can set up an impending drop, the exact moment when a track pushes the listener from a head nod into a full-body flux, and how to subdivide that sensation even further.
As plugged-in as all his fastidiously designed timbres might make him seem, Taylor’s approach is decidedly old-school in spirit. A DIY lifer who cut his teeth in Denver and Philly’s experimental scenes before finally ending up in New York, his music is more of a piece with the underground art-rock of decades past: the Zach Hills and Deerhoofs of this world whose acrobatic musicianship could only be outpaced by their need to deploy it for the silliest purposes imaginable. Throughout Starchris, Taylor decodes the anything-goes outlook of the modern internet addict and brings it hurtling into the real world. On “Crystalize,” after two woozy minutes of plastic psychedelia where Taylor’s buzzy tones seem to be going eight different directions at once, the most surprising moment of all comes when he locks into a straight-ahead 4/4 groove. Layering it with blown-out synths and a marimba arpeggio that would be at home in a Banjo-Kazooie boss fight, Taylor holds just enough reign over his discombobulating ideas to steer them through one thrilling detour after another.
