529

Bookending Starchris, Body Meat’s (Chris Taylor’s) staggering avant-pop phantasmagoria of a debut LP, is a repeated statement of self-affirmation: “I am right here.” For the upstate-NY-based singer, songwriter and producer, this is a mantra that he uses both to assuage panic and, with loved ones, to express devotion—assuring them that he is available to them even in difficult moments. Across its 13 tracks, Starchris sketches a protagonist moving through a series of internal struggles, exploring self-doubt, memory, trauma, and indecision. The hairpin emotional turns in the lyrics are acutely mirrored in the music, populated with backfiring dance beats, rippling Autotune hooks, volcanic surges of electronic noise, and more. By invoking simple phrases like “I am right here” in the midst of the upheaval, Taylor grounds us and draws us into the fiery emotional center of Starchris—a thesis statement for his chameleonic and uncompromising sound.

Since creating the moniker in 2016, Chris Taylor’s releases as Body Meat have functioned like musical sandboxes, each very distinct from the other, with different dimensions and house rules. Enamored with multi-instrumentalist pop iconoclasts from Stevie Wonder to Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Utah-born, Maryland-raised Taylor began working in earnest on music in his early 20s, practicing instruments to find his own singular feel on them. After a musical coming-of-age period playing in art-rock bands in Denver, he set out on his own with the intention of making each of his releases sound like a new and unfamiliar landscape—a broadcast from somewhere outside of any scene or record collection.

“I said ‘I’m gonna make a project where I can change the genre and anything about it whenever I want,’” Taylor remembers. “‘That is always going to be the goal for this band.’”

The earliest Body Meat EPs are brittle, lo-fi experiments in noise and no-wave, based around stark guitar and percussion interplay; every song bursts with the joy Taylor was finding in the act of discovery. Subsequently, 2019’s Truck Music and 2021’s Year of the Orc incorporated strains of trap production and the Ethiopian and funk music his parents—both soul musicians—played for him as a kid. The sound Taylor was patenting felt like something much more ingenious and personal than pastiche: alluring and strange, built from scrap parts, brimming over with live-wire energy.

On Starchris, Taylor puts the distinctive musical language he has spent years perfecting to the test, scaling exhilarating heights of chaos, complexity, and pop infectiousness. Returning to writing and recording in the wake of getting married and relocating from Philadelphia to upstate New York, Taylor began to assemble a collection of songs using a fully electronic sound palette. Often, they pass by like montages: Sections are interrupted by interludes of electronic dysfunction and then returned to, or snap into entirely new grooves. On Starchris, it feels like no idea ever really begins or ends; we are just shifting between vantages of events that are playing out continually and simultaneously.

Taylor’s formal inspiration for the record was video and computer games. An aficionado of RPGs and anime since a young age, he was immersed in games like the notoriously complex Elden Ring and Nier Automata while making it. Not only did the songs evoke the kinetic energy of gameplay—Taylor eventually adopted a structure for the record as a whole that resembles a video game quest narrative, in which his protagonist seeks to break a mysterious curse. “I imagined each song on the album as a sort of level,” he explains, “All the characters are different versions of each other working to break this pattern of generational and familial difficulties.”

Throughout the album, Taylor—or his avatar—charts a rough trajectory through cut-scene-like moments and bosses of various difficulty levels, leading toward an ultimate moment of self-realization and peace (“Paradise”). He accepts his quest on “The Mad Hatter,” dominated by scintillating pop synths and vertiginous polyrhythms, culminating in a circular melodic pattern that recalls an orb of energy spinning endlessly in space—a cycle that must be broken. Taylor calls the trap-inflected “High Beams” the first level or boss, and therefore, the least taxing, pitting catchy, grounding melodies reminiscent of Playboi Carti or Lil Uzi Vert against atonal diversions and flashes of nu-metal. The exhilarating lead single “Focus,” meanwhile, evokes Taylor’s avatar cruising in a car through a futuristic city, shimmering with urgently pulsating pads and a surround-sound collection of fractured, skittering percussion gestures.

Musically and thematically, the album’s clearest microcosm is “Crystalize,” in which Taylor’s protagonist fights to unify disparate sides of himself for the sake of a loved one. Appropriately, Taylor flits back and forth between completely different stylistic modes with a fluidity that has no right to make musical sense but somehow sounds totally intuitive. There are pools of textured noise, overdriven keyboard motifs, and knotty beats that incorporate trap, footwork, and house elements. The unguarded emotional climax (“And when you look into my eyes, I promise I won’t cry”) opens up into Taylor’s take on Top-40-ready EDM. In its second half, the track starts eating itself, overwhelmed by filter sweeps and surges of distortion created by sending the entire track through effects that Taylor controlled in real time, like a DJ.

“It was the song [that] set off the whole idea of the album,” Taylor explains. “It sounded like it was being manipulated as you listened to it, and I started to do that with other songs too.”

“Crystalize” is perhaps the most ambitious and singular moment on Starchris, but it is not the game’s most challenging level. The searing, dissonant electronica of the title track, for instance, finds Taylor reconnecting with his noise music roots. “I wanted to be so in the way and do the craziest, most annoying, the most me song—one that’s not trying to be anything, like at DIY shows where I didn’t care what anyone thought,” he explains. The eight-minute “Obu No Seirei (Spirit Of An Orb),” meanwhile, is Taylor’s espoused “final boss,” highlighting his protagonist’s darkest, more self-doubting thoughts over an unruly cluster of MIDI orchestral instruments (“Are we really that safe in my arms?”). The song ends, however, with a constructive call to action as an industrial dance beat kicks in: “I can move,” repeated ad infinitum.

In its totality, Starchris evokes both the exhilaration and the emotional challenges that are part of any long, transformative journey. This is music in frantic motion, reaching for imaginative new ideas to shift its trajectory toward a place that feels even more surprising and refreshing—searching for utopia. Suitably, the album cover features four clones of Taylor in a car, in active poses suggestive of various gradations of joy and despair.

“I hope people have fun listening to the album and enjoy the ride of it,” Taylor says. “I want it to feel like [the listener] is in that car with them.”

With a record as engrossing and emotionally affecting as this, it would be hard to imagine taking the full trip without feeling consumed and, ultimately, changed—caught up in its dizzying, visionary contrasts.