For all the critical plaudits and acres of blog coverage, dubstep has thus far proved the kind of genre that defies the mainstream: its bass-heavy sound is too strange and experimental to be co-opted into the world of the top 40 rundown and the Chris Moyles show. Which is perhaps where Oliver Jones, who records and DJs under the name Skream, comes in. His underground credentials are beyond reproach. He worked at Croydon's Big Apple Records, dubstep's glamour-packed equivalent of having hung out at Sun Studios in 1957. His 2005 single, Midnight Request Line, was one of the tracks that defined the genre. But he's also the man behind the closest thing to an actual hit the dubstep scene has produced: a sinister, flatly brilliant remix of La Roux's In for the Kill that left the 80s retro original seeming undernourished and underwhelming by comparison.

On the one hand, Jones's second album follows the standard template of dance albums since time immemorial: track featuring obscure or once-famous rapper (8 Bit Baby, featuring MURS); ambient interludes (Perferated, A Song for Lenny); track featuring either an 80s pop or indie/rock vocalist (La Roux, repaying Jones's remix favours on Finally); instrumental suggesting that there's some corner of even the most streetwise electronic producer that is forever Vangelis, largely because it's called something deeply portentous like Fields of Emotion (Fields of Emotion). On the other hand, you're continually struck by a sense of an artist trying to do something different, to push at the boundaries of his chosen genre, to see how the apparently uncommercial sound of dubstep might be adapted to achieve some kind of crossover success. Jones would doubtless deny that's what he's doing – for one thing, underground artists who make a bid for the mainstream tend to keep their intentions quiet, and for another, Leeds-based producer Rusko tried something similar earlier this year on an album called OMG, to which the general reaction seemed to be FFS. It's an argument that you suspect would meet with stony, mortified silence back in Big Apple Records, but you could suggest that a lot of Outside the Box has less in common with Midnight Request Line than it does with Britney Spears's Freakshow, the 2007 album track on which producers Bloodshy and Avant relocated a wobbling dubstep bassline to the middle of a pop song.

In fairness, you would be hard-pushed to call any album that includes Wibbler – not so much a piece of music as a splitting headache waiting to happen – a concerted push for mainstream acceptance, but nevertheless, it's pretty clear what Jones is up to for large chunks of the album: taking elements from dubstep and trying to apply them to other genres. It's a tough call – a vast lacuna separates dubstep from what's happening on the Radio 1 playlist – but Jones's approach to bridging it is subtle and beguiling. If How Real, an attempt at Auto-Tuned vocal pop, falls flat (less to do with the intriguing production, which features a two-step garage beat, a huge bassline, a plethora of reverb effects and muted variant on the kind of uplifting synth arpeggio central to trance, than the fact that the song itself isn't much cop) and MURS's rap on 8 Bit Baby isn't as strong as Jones's backdrop – a lovely elaborate meshwork of electronic tones – there are other moments where he pulls off a difficult feat with aplomb. A collaboration with singer Sam Frank, Where You Should Be, locates a weird but delightful middle-ground between pop R&B's melodic lushness and dubstep's spare beats and sense of space. Finally is equally fantastic: there's something daring about its dismantling of a pop song, reassembling it in scattered fragments separated by bleak instrumental passages, its success aided by the fact that La Roux's vocal sounds less like a car alarm than usual. CPU joins the dots between dubstep and Kraftwerk-inspired 80s electro-pop, its synths buzzing like a faulty striplight.

Weirdly, however, the album's two most commercial moments come when Jones starts looking backwards. Listenin' to the Records on My Wall is a loving recreation of early 90s hardcore techno, pitched between euphoria and melancholy. It sounds less nostalgic than wistful, which seems fitting, given that Jones was about six years old during hardcore's height. The prosaically titled The Epic Last Song offers the kind of drum'n'bass now characterised, terrifyingly enough for anyone who remembers it first time around, as old skool: another brilliant pastiche. You might argue that recreating the dance music of the past isn't really what people come to a producer like Jones for: they want the future. But it's all of a piece with the album's storefront feel: its central message seems to be, look what I can do. When you do, it's hard not to be impressed.