Body Meat – Starchris
Partisan Records
Chris Taylor likes leaning into sonic chaos—fusing dance, metal, and trap to shape Body Meat’s strikingly tumultuous electronic pop.
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His previous EPs, Year of the Orc and Truck Music, harnessed the strange beauty of such volatility. Taylor wasn’t afraid to throw different genres at the wall to see what stuck. And while the jarring production style could’ve teetered on too much, there was enough legibility to warrant deeper listening.
Taylor elevates his experimental vision for pop music on Starchris. Partly inspired by the video game storytelling in Elden Ring and Nier Automata, Taylor bills his debut LP as a sort of “hero’s journey,” with each song a stage. It’s easy to imagine completing quests to the erratic twists and turns of Taylor’s music: On “Crystalize,” crunchy distortions slam into looping footwork, as if a villain landed a particularly weighty blow, but it quickly picks up and throws you back into its entrancing rhythm.
He even visualizes his zigzagging sound in a game he coded for “North Side,” which was released alongside the single for listeners to play. The song begins with skittish electronic instrumentals before bursting into a fit of heavy percussion punctuated by swelling synths. (The game itself follows a shop keep trying to save his home from a ballooning orb of light, and it pairs well with the excitement of Taylor’s arrangement.)
Starchris maintains a constant, contagious energy. Each track is an unpredictable landscape of scattering dance beats and maxed-out AutoTune. But its labyrinthine nature never becomes tedious—it’s a thrill to follow the maze and make sense of Taylor’s sounds. – GRADE: B+
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