Body Meat’s ‘Starchris’ doesn’t deliver on all its promises, but it doesn’t have to

I’d consider myself to generally be a pretty trusting person, but there are a few things that rouse my skepticism. I don’t answer calls from strangers, I take the bus times posted by SEPTA with a grain of salt, and above all, if an electronic musician claims to be “inspired by the hyperreal world of video games,” I roll my eyes. There are electronic artists who can certainly earn the claim, sure – I doubt Crystal Castles or Anamanguchi would sound the way they do if the Atari never made it into living rooms – but oftentimes, when someone compares pitches an electronic album to me as sounding like “the soundtrack to a video game that never existed,” it comes off as a marketing gimmick hatched by someone unaware of the rich history of electronic music and vaguely aware of what Mario sounds like. Of course, when the music press heralded Starchris, the debut full-length from Philadelphia multi-hyphenate Christopher Taylor (aka Body Meat), as a fictional world inspired by glossy role-playing video games like Elden Ring and NieR: Automata, and that each track was actually a “level” rather than a song, I was instantly skeptical.

If I hadn’t done my due diligence as a reviewer to seek out every bit of criticism and promotional material I could surrounding this record, I’d have no idea that Starchris was supposed to be an homage to video games. As far as the music itself goes, the first points of inspiration that struck me were the works of deconstructed-club musicians like Arca, Amnesia Scanner, or Garden of Delete-era Oneohtrix Point Never. Nothing about the lyrics struck me as particularly gamelike either; themes of leaving your body and breaking reality abound, but those are themes you can find in every type of art, from the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Bladee lyrics.

In my research since my first listen to Starchris, I’ve discovered that it’s a concept album dually about a fictional programmer who’s trapped themselves inside their own fictional video game and a fictional shopkeeper in a very-real RPG that Taylor himself is secretly developing. It’s an ambitious concept, but if that’s the story Taylor wanted to tell, then I can’t say that I’m getting any of it from listening to Starchris, aside from lyrics that sometimes flirt directly with video game imagery – take “North Side,” which sees Taylor crooning, “Sold 15 of your swords / No no feeling I’m / On the worst side / Let the kingdom fight.”

Still, what’s left is a fantastic debut record, even if it whiffs the whole video-game thing. Starchris sounds a lot like its album cover, a shot of an all-black SUV with the top sliced off; this thing is dark, complex, and propulsive. The jazziness on earlier EPs like World’s Biggest Drum and Truck Music is basically absent; these tracks are morose soundscapes often devoid of melody, aside from Taylor’s trap-influenced vocals. Highlights like “High Beams,” “Electrische,” and the title track all begin as messes of bass and sirens, with Taylor’s expressive auto-crooning serving as a light through the chaos. In fact, the general modus operandi of Starchris seems to be making sense of the decade of chaos that Body Meat has unfurled onto the Philly electronic scene; the nearly-hour-long runtime is the first time I’ve felt like Taylor has given himself ample opportunity to explore all of his ideas. The mathy rhythms stick around long enough to lodge themselves in your head, and the slower, more ambient tracks like “Right Here” ground all of the chaos and pull it into perspective. SOPHIE’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides or Death’s Dynamic Shroud’s Darklife come to mind; surrealist un-club albums that build some much-needed breathing room into the tracklist.

Starchris isn’t quite fantastical, but it is fantastic. Does it create a fictional world of its own? Not really, but it pairs great with playing high-octane shoot ‘em ups like Neon White or Ikaruga until your eyes bleed. It’d be nice to see Taylor take another, more committed stab at this postmodern concept, but it’s hard to be too upset about what could’ve been when Starchris sounds this good.