On his first proper album in over a decade, the meticulous pop experimenter known as Cornelius arrives floating on the promised Mellow Waves of its title. Gentle guitars and soft-hued synths sustain a mood of a familiar but far-flung locale: a veneer of artistic maturity that camouflages the brilliant and ambitious playfulness of the 48-year-old former guitarist Keigo Oyamada’s music. Known for the wild, kaleidoscopic pastiche of 1997’s Fantasma, Oyamada’s Cornelius continues to specialize in creating moments of startling fun, even if his sonic palette isn’t always as show-offy and sugar-coated as it once was.
It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. The jazzy exotica of the opening “If You’re Here” sounds so much like pop that Oyamada’s deconstructed arrangement flits by almost unnoticed. But it is music no one else could make. Oyamada’s hyperactive early albums, representative of Tokyo’s cut-and-paste Shibuya-kei scene of the mid-’90s, led to a career defined not by novelty but an evolving compositional voice. While bloops skittered across a vast bleep grid on 2002’s Point and bright grooves dominated 2006’s Sensuous, Mellow Waves aims itself at the glowing emotional core of Oyamada’s retro-futuristic soundworld; it even contains, in both Japanese and English, some fairly straightforward love songs. Though he’s still drawing from the same kitschy waters from which he pulled his Planet of the Apes-referencing name, the easy pop feels of songs like “In a Dream” are its least interesting moments, despite being a tonal element that holds the album together.
But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface. Live, Cornelius and his band have been known to transmogrify his constructions into surprisingly fluid Stop Making Sense-like grooves, all miraculously synced to the songs’ dizzyingly rhythmic videos. Mellow Waves’ lead clip, for the dreamy “If You’re Here,” continues this trend with a strikingly complementary pairing of sound and image.
Which isn’t to say Cornelius doesn’t still get lit and set off fireworks. Keyboards and acoustic guitars and synth dabs politely pop into view during the verse of “Sometime / Someplace,” culminating in an ecstatic chorus filled with slashing, dizzyingly panned guitar and, by the song’s end, a toy noise break. It’s classic Oyamada, perhaps as close to Fantasma as he’s gotten since that album. “Mellow Yellow Feel” goes equally ape, with a stacked Cornelius chorus and stereo-panned interlocking guitar patterns in the manner of Point. But in general, he keeps it under his wig, musically speaking. On the archetypal Cornelius groove “Helix / Spiral,” a repeated vocal mantra almost completely distracts from the digital snares, synth patterns, robo-voices, and other rhythmic events, all making coordinated entrances as if high-stepping into a Busby Berkeley Hollywood dance spectacular one soundstage over.
Releasing his American debut on mega-indie Matador near the late-‘90s peak of the pre-Napster CD era, Oyamada was futuristic beyond his sound, setting the stage for the more global scene of the 21st century. While “Shibuya-kei” may not make for trend pieces anymore, its eclectic and playful coordinates can be heard in a range of contemporary projects like Are Euphoria, the most recent collection of hyper-real dream-paths by ex-Ponytail guitarist Dustin Wong and producer Takako Minekawa, Oyamada’s ex-wife. Former Yura Yura Teikoku leader Shintaro Sakamoto (who contributes lyrics on Mellow Waves), has lately taken his own exotica interests to Hawaiian lap-steel-dappled climes. Cornelius continues on, too. Though Mellow Waves follows Sensuous by 11 years, Oyamada has spent his time on video game and anime soundtracks and productions for other artists (Salyu x Salyu’s S(o)un(d)beams is a must for serious Cornelius heads).
Concluding with a trio of electro-acoustic reveries, including the English-language “The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness” (sung by Lush’s Miki Berenyi), Mellow Waves arrives at a grace heard only fleetingly on previous Cornelius releases. Nominally an acoustic piece, “The Rain Song” turns individually struck guitar notes into rhythmic starlight ripples and layered vocals. The concluding “Crépuscule” takes it further, gradually opening up into infinite space while Oyamada’s guitar grows even more intricate. A quarter-century since disbanding Flipper’s Guitar and arriving on his own private Planet of the Apes, Keigo Oyamada continues to be some kind of genius, though happily still undecided about which kind.
