Skream, Outside The Box
An ambitious and big-minded producer trying to make the most of where dubstep stands to go
As it continues to refract and evolve, the dance-music style known as dubstep has wandered onto a number of intriguing byways. Some artists, like Actress, have stopped worrying over genre and engaged a newly mesmerizing array of timeless, boundless "bass music" sounds. Others, like Zomby, have switched on to the imagined transmissions of zoned-out video-game fiends. Still others, like James Blake and Mount Kimbie, have softened up and set out to make a supremely emotional kind of post-human soul.
Skream never seemed a likely candidate for the latter, but he wasn't exactly a sure thing for any of the others either. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that he would basically go ahead and do all three — plus a little more on the sides. Not that Outside the Box makes a lot of sense: Indeed, as an album, it's a fractious, fragile and highly fraught mess. But what is dubstep circa 2010 if not a laboratory for various styles and sounds to go wrong — and sound all the more right for their failure?
Skream hails from Croydon, a district within dubstep's formative home city of London. From there, he's helped goose the genre along from its early '00s days as a backdrop for grime to its latter days — pretty much now and counting — as a new form all its own. Starting with his breakout single "Midnight Request Line" in 2005, his records for the timely label Tempa have ranked as important briefings from dubstep's frontline, enough that he's collaborated or shared vinyl space with some of the scene's biggest names (Benga, Shackleton, Loefah) and earned the right to put out a five-volume series of EPs self-importantly titled Skreamizm.
Outside the Box takes bits of Skream's past activity and crams them into one swelling statement of purpose. The style changes drastically, such that a more or less ordinary mid-tempo rap track ("8 Bit Baby," with oddly lifeless vocals by) can shift meaningfully into the haunted and haunting robot sulk of "CPU," which sounds like Kraftwerk coming apart and limping across a desert in the mid-day sun. The latter plays way more to Skream's main strength, which is all the more apparent when he slows things down and gives his spacious atmospheres and evocative rhythms room to breathe. To that end, it's easy to imagine some sort of oddball hit status for "Where You Should Be," a plaintive ballad that matches missing-you vocals to rainbow-colored synth oscillations, melancholic sub-bass, and a beat that thwacks with a short-story's worth of exposition and mood.
Not all of Skream's best moments are slow. "How Real" jumps and jags through a hyper mix of chopped-up vocals, while tracks like "Listenin' to the Records on My Wall" play teeth-gnashing tribute to the early '90s heyday of jungle and hardcore rave. Nor are all his moments even close to best: "Finally," a collaboration with La Roux, wanders too far toward overwrought trance treacle, and the quasi-ambient interlude "Metamorphosis" doesn't do much more than "quasi-ambient interlude" might suggest.
But even the album's missteps, such as they are, show Skream as an ambitious and big-minded producer trying to make the most of where dubstep stands to go. There's a geeky sense of excitement and curiosity in both his reaching and his over-reaching, and his ears are clearly open and attuned.
