Starkey – Open The Pod Bay Doors EP
Ninja Tune: 2011
Nobody has done more, on a global scale, for American bass music than Philadelphia’s Starkey (Paul Geissinger on his driver’s license). The sci-fi influenced street bass magnate has put out several absolutely massive records on legendary British label Planet Mu, as well as running his own Seclusiasis and Slit Jockey labels domestically, and is one of only a small handful of American dubstep producers to be taken seriously by discerning overseas bass-heads. Starkey has cultivated a distinct, immediately recognizable sound, rife with slick, otherworldly pads, ray-gun synth stabs, and monstrously weighty bass sounds that very rarely stoop to dumbed-down mid-range wobble cliches.
It’s heavy and hard enough to appeal to American dubstep fans, but artful enough to be appreciated by slightly more discerning, less bloodthirsty (read: more mature) UK bass faithful. Never guilty of overcrowding his tracks, the Starkey sound is loaded with negative space, and his coldly futuristic sound palette makes those spaces dramatic and anxious, between perfectly-placed drops hard enough to cause cardiac complications. To put it another way, a Starkey track sounds like a soundtrack for interstellar gang violence. It’s ghetto music for the bad neighborhoods of another solar system. Is it still called a “drive-by” if you’re in a spaceship? His current EP release, Open The Pod Bay Doors, marks his first for Ninja Tune, home of seemingly hundreds of other seminal producers and another impressive bullet point for Starkey’s resume in and of itself.
Open The Pod Bay Doors opens with its title track, and at first represents such a stark (no pun intended, though some achieved) contrast with the aforementioned ‘Starkey sound’ that I had to repeatedly check that I hadn’t clicked the wrong artist in Itunes. Opening with dusty-sounding toy piano and a plaintive, Auto-Tuned vocal verse before opening up a bit with some live-sounding drums at a galloping clip, an insistent guitar riff and catchy indie-pop synths, the first half of the track is essentially a different genre than the foreboding “street bass” making up the rest of Starkey’s catalog. The thing is, though- it’s beautiful. The melodies are engaging, the rhythm is hypnotic without being too introverted- what you’ve got here is some kick-ass synth-pop for four-and-a-half minutes. “Open The Pod Bay Doors” is a six-minute song though, and once your 4:30 of pretty pop is up, just as you’ve stopped expecting it, you are treated to a breathtakingly massive drop. Enter the Starkbass, all at once, in all of its window-rattling, headphone-humbling glory. “Open The Pod Bay Doors” is easily the most ambitious production of Starkey’s career, arguably more ‘songwriting’ than ‘production,’ and the whole thing goes off as an unqualified success.
The rest of the EP is a return to form for the Philly production maestro, a collection of grim, scary tracks for aliens to have razor blade fights by. “Blood Roses”, “Rayguns”, and “Beta Tester” stick with his winning formula of pairing southern rap-ready drum patterns (as well as the occasional ghetto-house four on the floor) with punishing sub-bass and shiny synth leads. His real flair is, and has always been, drama, and these tracks are no exception- there’s pregnant pauses, murderous drops and enough of an orchestral sensibility to give all this abstract sci-fi violence an emotional weight you simply can’t get from most other producers of aggressive bass music. American dubstep has been cheapened and nearly invalidated by a bunch of artless thugs, but as long as Starkey’s making records you can’t count it out entirely.
3.5 out of 5
