As dubstep has spread to an American fanbase, artists like Rusko and Emalkay have theorized that stateside audiences gravitate toward the harder stuff, the heavy bass of dubstep's aggro side. For a while, Starkey fit this profile. The Philly-based producer's early releases ("Corner Store Riddim", "Pins", "Bounce") sounded like a dry run for a new, heavy American take on classic 2-step. Starkey's debut album, Ephemeral Exhibits, put the gloss on his street bass sound: The beats stayed massive, but rave pianos, electro synths, and ghostly, pitched-up divas gave them a bright neon hue. Starkey's gift for matching melodic complexity to his forceful rhythms became clear-- tracks that could've otherwise just sounded huge wound up feeling moving as well. With his second album, Ear Drums and Black Holes, Starkey amplifies those tendencies-- every beat is matched to a soulful melody.
Granted, it's a particularly wonky kind of soul. Starkey's compositions are filtered through the heavy buzzes and oscillating warbles of the post-Joker sound. So you get these soaring, emotive melodies, with 2-step beats loosely translated into contemporary R&B ("Neck Snap") or American club rap ("Murderous Words") that unfold into ultra-dense counterpoints between sweetly toned harmonies and clobbering low-end. And the tracks get more compelling the further those roles are blurred: The fundamentals of great bass music rely on every component reacting to and building on the rhythm, and in the purplish "11th Hour" or the rave-evoking "Multidial", multiple rhythms merge into a big wave of percussive harmony. The effect is nothing short of euphoric.
Yet for all its epic sweep, there's a certain lightheartedness and a sly sense of humor here-- a self-aware sense of playing with stylistic expectations. When the Underworld-esque "Fourth Dimension" baits the listener with a 4/4 throb in its first minute, only to switch to a gelatinous bassline, it's a great joke; when Starkey reincorporates the false-start melody into the track midway through, it's a stroke of brilliance. And even the Auto-Tune makes an odd sort of sense, cropping up on "Spacecraft" and "Alienstyles" where it feels right at home in the tracks' subtly tongue-in-cheek sci-fi futurism.
Starkey's style is rich with crossover potential, yet it could use a bit more adaptation to the hip-hop influences with which it feels made to fuse. Maybe it comes down to picking the right MC for the job-- "Bounce" combined dubstep with Young Dro's hook and made it work, after all-- but Starkey's beats accommodate Londoner P Money's rapidfire grime flow ("Numb") more comfortably than the simple, halting cadence of San Antonio indie-rapper Cerebral Vortex ("Murderous Words"; "Club Games"). Still, the job of bringing dubstep to the States has a worthy heir in Starkey, an ambassador of the style that proves American crowds don't have to stick with the hard and bleak.
