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Cornelius

Sensuous

Everloving | 2007 | Album

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Keigo Oyamada, aka Cornelius, cleverly teeters on the line of cheesy synth-pop and intriguing post-pop with his fifth album, Sensuous. He taps the curiously engaging synthesized bossa nova coming out of Brazil in the late 80s, but updates it and douses it with a bucket full of Shibuya-Kei.

Sensuous represents an intriguing development since 2002's Point, with the emphasis now firmly on soaring atmospherics, creative soundscapes and ambient flourishes. Sometimes this gives rise to moments of genuine inspiration, but at others it’s just quirky and experimental.

The album opens up in suitably beautiful fashion with the title track "Sensuous," a stripped down effort built around simple guitar licks and strange keyboards. It’s achingly simple and puts you into a nicely relaxed state of mind. But such moments are offset by efforts like "Fit Song" which don’t really get into sort of groove and wind up sounding slightly too arty for their own good.

You can't argue the album is absolutely bursting with enthusiasm. Cornelius seems to attack each song with the eager nature of a young child with a six-second attention span, shoving as many different ideas into his songs as possible. The album is delightfully loaded with sampling and style shifts. It's both organic and electronic, jerky and buoyant, and million other seemingly opposite dualities made possible through modern recording techniques. It is the work of a sound designer rather than just a musician.

Andy Heater