If you're Ollie Jones, a musician who's made his pseudonym on pushing an underground dance sound further into the mainstream without compromising its strengths, what do you do when it's time for a straight-up pop move? Maybe you drop a free mixtape or two (like his Freeizm releases) that stick to the formula that made you a dubstep champion, with the side effect that if the Big Album flops the longtime diehards will still have something to retreat to. Maybe you look back to a previous breakthrough-- something like 2005's definitive "Midnight Request Line"-- and extrapolate just how far out an idea like that should sound five years later. And maybe you take a shot at building off the momentum of your last and possibly biggest pop turn, the slow-burn magnificence of last year's remix of La Roux's "In for the Kill", and try to figure out how much of that there is to spread across an hour's worth of new music.
What you don't do is crank everything up to desperate look-at-me extremes, and remembering that is what makes Outside the Box smarter than your typical underground-goes-pop set. From the outset, Skream's best music worked in a modular, easily graspable way that helped it click with both neophytes and early adopters. And he did it by creating unlikely hybrids of mood: late-night gloom and enthusiastic cheer, sweat-soaked dread and childlike giddiness, snarling aggression and light fragility. By balancing these tones, Skream could stretch in two different emotional directions without going overboard, and he continues that trend admirably on this album.
The more pop-friendly moments nail this split-personality approach, where tracks like "Where You Should Be" and "How Real" simultaneously bring heavy, frame-rattling basslines for the steppers and wistful pop-R&B vocals for the lover's-rock crowd. The former track filters vocalist Sam Frank through a phalanx of overdubs, Auto-Tuning, and reverb, while the latter chops Freckles' voice up into a hiccupy, almost Todd Edwards-style Macintalk splice job. But the singers are manipulated into digital unreality in stirring ways that bristle with the same energy as rest of the production. And when La Roux reprises her famous remix team-up on "Finally", the thin shakiness of her voice is integrated into the beat in a way that makes it sound like an advantage, creating an atmosphere of delicate strength as it's engulfed by the rest of the melody.
A jaded eye might look at all the "feat." parentheticals and cringe a bit; in the case of "8 Bit Baby", a plinky showcase for Murs' corniest tendencies, they'd be right to. But there's still smart production beneath all the guest vocals. Skream knows what pleases crowds, which accounts for some tracks' idea of heaviness being a wobble bass that sounds like the turbines of an obese helicopter ("Wibbler") or a hissing, spitting Atari gone rogue ("CPU"). But he also goes for carefully layered component building instead of just constantly cranking up one prominent element of his sound. That's how he gets the same expressive resonance out of instrumental tracks like "Fields of Emotion" and "Perferated" as he does out of the vocal showcases, leaning on subtle but evocative melodic keyboard progressions and basslines so sturdy you could bounce to them without drums.
And if you had any other doubts as to what kind of pop move this is, keep in mind that Skream's efforts to please all sorts of crowds also skews toward the ones who remember and/or revere the sounds of the early-to-mid 1990s. "I Love the Way" features prominent rave-diva vocals via a Jocelyn Brown sample, floating over a shuddering dubstep throb that waits until the last 90 seconds to shatter into breakbeat. "Metamorphosis" strips the droning ambience of prime Photek and Dillinja for parts, tearing out the frenetic drums and refitting it with a restrained pulse punctuated by the occasional massive snare hit. And the drums from the infamous jungle-birthing "Amen" break actually show up twice, underpinning the trilling dial tone melodies of "Listenin' to the Records on My Wall" and rattling through the euphoric drum'n'bass revivalism of "The Epic Last Song". Of all the contradictions Skream has somehow managed to reconcile, a crossover bid that doubles as a back-to-the-roots move might be the most audacious.
