Demetri Martin: 2005-12-27, Hoboken
Live at a benefit show.
cornelius: sensuous
Cornelius
Sensuous download
[Everloving; 2007]
Rating: 7.8
The 1997 Matador release of the still-great Fantasma established Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) as the far-East posterboy for indie-rock globalization. As the most recognizable representative of downtown Tokyo's Shibuya-Kei movement (also responsible for Pizzicato Five, Buffalo Daughter and Fantastic Plastic Machine), Oyamada’s Beck-like star potential and wildly creative imagination led to a stateside buzz all-too-rare for Japanese musicians. But a release schedule that includes five-year windows between albums isn't the best way to maintain hype. It was 2002 before the follow-up Point boiled Fantasma down to its essence: a wonderful fusion of rubbery, acoustic micro-house rhythms. With another five years now having passed, Sensous represents yet another step forward for Oyamada’s unique headphone pop. It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.
Sensuous opens with Oyamada revisiting one of Point's main techniques: composing songs with the individual sounds kept clearly separate. His fascination with the hi-fi stereophonic demonstration records of the 1950s and 60s-- the ones that presented the full range of the stereo spectrum through whirring, buzzing sound experiments-- finds its full and rewarding realization here, but in function more than form. Often on Sensous, as on Point, it often feels as though Oyamada starts by writing normal songs, but then inserts sounds into the places where there are none, erases the original melody, and keeps the music's negative.
The title track is a meditative series of plucked guitar strings-- not completely unlike something you'd hear on Four Tet's Rounds-- phased between the left and right channels. But this initial sense of serenity quickly gives way to the more recognizable bustle of "Fit Song". It replaces the sonorous acoustic with the muted, clipped strum of an electric guitar, which provides the rhythmic bed for the first minute of the song, as bass drums and hi-hats bounce around with Oyamada’s single-word incantations ("just," "fit," "click"). The song feels like a stylized metropolitan soundtrack, but its video (which is included on the disc) suggests a more modest milieu that reflects the song's senses of humor and wonder. Syncing the movements of typically inanimate objects to the music, the video, like the album, is indulgent and geometric: sugarcubes form steps for a pair of spoons to climb, toothbrushes dance in a circle, the contents of a coin purse form a floating infinity symbol.
"Fit" also marks the record's first appearance of Oyamada's favorite instrument of late (and, it should be noted, a point of friction for many listeners): a spacy, sonorant synthesizer that provides a soft and windy counterpoint to the skipping stones all around it. Later on the irresistable "Beep It", the synth serves a new-wavier rhythmic purpose, with Oyamada's monosyllabic mojo more resembling the sounds of a retro-futuristic aerobics class, and "Music" gradually introduces the instrument into its melange of chirping guitars and melismatic vocals, lending the song a fluffy, space-age buoyancy.
Sequenced after the copy-machine-sampling "Toner", "Watadori" feels like an extended fever-dream from a nap under an office desk. Multiple layers of soft-jazz guitar tick off and ascend higher and higher, coalescing into busy-but-gentle treble-buzz, the equivalent of twenty different CTI-label records played at the same time. Oyamada's newfound predilection for the oft-criticized and elevatored music is most fully realized on Breezin'", an inventive interpolation of the jazz-pop standard made famous by Gabor Szabo and later, George Benson. The song feels like perfect source material for Oyamada to work with, and while he thoroughly launders it of its core melodic structure, he manages to maintain its, well, breeziness. Like an installation piece on a constant loop, ascending three-note synth runs and chimes provide a chilly melodicism as the song works its way, over and over, to a surprisingly lilting payoff. Its doppelganger, "Gum", emerges later, with his vocals ping-ponging over a punk-metal guitar drone previously explored on Point's "I Hate Hate".
Sensuous ends with a second, even less-expected cover: a faithful update of the Rat Pack standard "Sleep Warm", on which Oyamada augments Frankie and Dean’s maudlin sentimentality with his own vocodered vocals and loud, trilling synth flourishes. While this version certainly would be tough to fall asleep to, its album-closing position makes it feel more like a film-closing credit roll, similar to The White Album’s "Good Night". Now, apparently, we just have to wait five more years for the sequel.
-Eric Harvey, April 13, 2007
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