Cornelius - Mellow Waves
The Quietus
Before sitting down with Mellow Waves, Japanese sonic wizard Keigo Oyamada’s first album in a decade, I only had one clear connection to his work - the 2002 song 'Drop'. It’s from his most recognised record, Point, but it also features on the Matador at Fifteen anniversary compilation. Amid the guitar bands dominating that collection, 'Drop' took me to thoughts of natural rock formations worn smooth by aeons-old wellsprings, a dripping faucet into a dirty coffee cup, overflowing gutters after a storm with the air still burnt from electricity. It also tipped me to the myriad possibilities that are presented when production becomes alchemy: no limits offered, no fucks given, all with an impish grin and a love of endless left-turns and hard brakes. It was truly exhilarating.
Mellow Waves continues the exuberant cut-and-paste enthusiasm and lush, busy soundscapes. 'If You’re Here' is a slow burner, a lounge synth slink that feels like a seductive coffee bar sojourn, all smoke and mirrors, velvet curtains and smouldering cigarettes. 'Dear Future Person' and 'The Spell Of A Vanishing Loneliness' follow in that vein, the former a floating slice of orchestral pop that expands until it is bursting with bright emotion, the latter an Air-breath evocation, incorporating English lyrics and vocal accompaniment from Lush lead singer Miki Berenyi.
On 'Sometime/Someplace', Cornelius offers a syncopation susurration that clutters the aural palette with supple Tortoise-like basslines and a frenetic guitar break swathed in electronic effects that could be 'Paranoid Android' run through Odelay-era Beck. His vocals are soft yet sharp, accentuated by the instrumental mania that crowds around him, a Tetris board of sonic effusion that exudes ebullient assurance. 'Helix/Spiral' takes the robotic vocals and warm analogue synth into a cyclic 8-bit playground. 'The Rain Song' is pastoral folk navel gazing for a parallel universe. 'Surfing on Mind Wave Pt 2' is a gossamer synth sine wave that shimmers with electronic glitter and sepulchral wash, a sine wave peak that is one of the best cuts here.
Mellow Waves reflects its title. Cornelius’s mastery of the mix is still evident, but the album as a whole comes strangely across as a throwback to former glories rather than an expansion of an idiosyncratic universe. Which, from a man who has spent the last decade crafting electrifying scores to game changing anime, making infinite remixes and playing alongside Yoko Ono and Yellow Magic Orchestra, is somewhat underwhelming.
Share this article:
Tue Sep 12 10:06:36 GMT 2017Pitchfork 77
Returning to his long-running solo act, the Japanese producer Keigo Oyamada aims for the glowing emotional core of his playful, retro-futuristic aesthetic.
Thu Jul 20 05:00:00 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 70
Cornelius
Mellow Waves
[Rostrum; 2017]
Rating: 3.5/5
So, the world is lucky enough to have a new Cornelius album, and it is plush af. It’s also overflowing with ear-perking, fancy-tickling intrigue. Please do enjoy the fruits of Keigo Oyamada’s labor. Don’t call it a comeback, or a waftback, or a return to form or a formless return. But you wouldn’t ever do that, you beautiful, discerning aesthete, you! You’re gonna leave plenty of room for these waves to lap your outstretched toes and perhaps be a little bit better for it.
Is Mellow Waves Fantasma-level good? Nope. Few albums are. But it is a welcome return nonetheless. All through the 1980s, Japan’s avant-garde took jazz fusion and proggy approaches to pop composition and redeemed those genre’s typically grandiloquent tendencies with a rare and winning restraint. Cornelius is a natural extension of this multi-disciplinary yet signature practice, and his densely thicketed shibuya-kei holds up neatly against the temporary contextualizations of trend. Fantasma, like The Avalanche’s Since I Left You three years later, married eclecticism and bliss-out propulsion in ambitious and indelible ways. Neither album has a misstep and both feature an endless series of delightful sound-trinkets nestled in a fetching, fortified advent calendar. The only downside is the massive sugar crash that can follow. But their judicious deployment of stirring emotion calls us back.
As appropriately soothing as these 10 new tracks are, there is that same curiously playful charm to keep the intrigue going. Despite not quite being the bevy of surprises that his masterwork was, the new album expands on the chiming riverside chamber math (especially in the knotty album highlight, “Mellow Yellow Feel”) that characterized its underrated follow-up (2001’s Point). Before Lush singer Miki Berenyi ushers in the wistful yet lazing ballad “The Spell of Vanishing Loveliness,” the maestro cuts a mini-cluster of synth toots running into two quick conductor-baton-tap high trills. It suggests a space in the ensuing rests (heralded by the same trills) that is less solemn than flatly uncertain. The subdued nature of this album is refreshingly down to earth for 2017, with its gentle distemper always creating fetching folds in the bedsheet. Its pop soul meandering is as much about embracing obstacles in the path to grace as it is gracefully skirting obstacles only to get somewhere unsettled. Through this, he allies himself with a world-weary listener’s fickle temperament.
For those who loved the more raucous material, there is some brief shredding on “Sometime/Someplace,” but this is a record that decidedly puts melancholy before rock & roll fun. But it’s in no way a downer. It feels like a mature statement from a seasoned craftsman that belies lulling adult-contempo moods without any of the tedium. It isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but it is an impeccably ravishing listen with no blunder (well, maybe that lady-scape on the cover is a bit unsettling). The Fennesz-esque interlude “Surfing on Mind Wave Pt. 2” (sequel to a Ghost in the Shell: Arise track) or the woozy loping contraption that is “Helix/Spiral” may’ve seemed out of place were it not for Oyamada’s expertly seamless sequencing. His ear is so acute that, even after many plays, one can easily forget just how surprisingly off this cerebral easy-listening LP can be. Mellow Waves might be a strange bedfellow for the seminal albums of the year so far, but it’s a nonetheless unassumingly essential artifact. Rather than make you go running back to Fantasma (or the late 90s in general), it inclines one to be more graciously attentive to the continually expanding oeuvre of one of left-field pop music’s brightest minds.
Drowned In Sound 60
Mellow Waves by Cornelius is a good album. It’s dreamy and creates a sense of fluid space, caught between energetic krautrock style and something more meditative. Maybe that’s just pop music for you, but I found myself craving the guitar riffs to break up the saccharine of the continual use of bleepy synthesiser.
'Sometime/ Someplace' features a beautiful animation video of musicians and other figures walking through outer space, perfectly synchronised with the musical rhythms, which are simultaneously smooth and explosive. Lovers of the Japanese language will enjoy the mickey-mousing, with the appearance of text spelling out the lyrics in the Roman alphabet. It’s almost an electro funk reworking of the classic, 'Til We Meet Again’, with the word goodbye repeated in multiple languages, presumably until some time or place.
Also conceived as a video, ‘If You are Here’ is one of the more downtempo, ambient tracks on the album. The imagery shows shivering bubbles and splashes in mid-air. Random objects moving slowly through the empty space of someone’s apartment. The resident never appears but we see their upturned coffee cup, their cigarette, personal jewellery and the painting on the wall cleverly morphing in time with the music – long synth chords offset with peaking guitar riffs and gentle vocals.
Who is Cornelius? Akeigo Oyamada started performing under the name about 20 years ago on Matador Records. This set him up as a kind of remix artist, as well as a professional musician, combining electronic sampling with layering of multiple instruments to produce an almost orchestral sound and then producing a range of other artists want to achieve a contemporary sound such a Blur or Beck.
This perhaps explains his musical style – a little overproduced and lacking in raw experimentation or emotional energy, which makes sense if he is the guy that is bought in to properly produce and finish albums. Cornelius is a skilled professional, with such credits as the score to Ghost in the Shell and performing in Yoko Ono's band. He is a professional. Which is why Mellow Waves is a very well made album, and true to its title.
The album comes in light lapping waves of melodic song. It doesn’t wash you away, it doesn’t lure you in to your death. It’s a nice album.
Thu Jul 27 22:29:19 GMT 2017