Cornelius

Fantasma (Matador)
by Nik Rainey

It’s an open secret that, when we Westerners swivel our hipness in praise of Japanese music, the xenophilic impulse up front is but a smokescreen that merely spurs our jingo-jango-jingoism. There’s an unmistakable air of condescension beneath our praise: Hey, everybody! Look at the cute constructions those little slant-eyed fellows made from the stuff we left behind! Isn’t that just sweet? C’mon, admit it, nobody’s reading this anyway – you didn’t cop those Jun Spugimoto Brues Exprosion and NagaSKAki discs ’cause they drove fresh new scores into archaic rock-formations, you got ’em so you and your friends could share a naughty chuckle over how they got “our” music wrong, conveniently ignoring how our own culture is comprised of everyone else’s discarded table scraps to begin with. Wa’al, Yanks, it’s time to shelve the childish jealousies and own up – sure, a lot of this Rising Sun rah-rah may only be the musical equivalent of those t-shirts with long strings of meaningless English phrases on ’em tourists like to bring back as Oriental swag (full disclosure: I crib most of my less-coherent reviews straight off of those silkscreens), but at least one of “them” has jetted ahead of most of “us” in the musical hybridization field, so you may as well trash those unwieldy American vehicles you’ve been tooling around in and hop into a factory-fresh 1998 Fantasma, tricked out with all the frills, bells, and whistles that the fine folks over at Cornelius Motors could fit beneath the hood, available to you at the low, low list price of $13.95 from your local Matador dealership. Keigo Oyamada, alias Cornelius (a Planet of the Apes allusion which leads to a bunch of simian refs in the liner notes – a kitschy affectation I’ll excuse if only because it gives Oyamada the excuse to call his team of technicians “The Orangu-Tang Clan”), is a multi-lingual pop adept of the rarest type, using every sound and style currently available over-the-counter to ends that transcend mere dilettantism. Above homage, beyond collage, Cornelius takes the pop-stock of our times and pushes it forward, bursting through the soundalike barrier and gunning the sucker right into the future.

To catalogue all the elements Cornelius cobbles together so brilliantly would be both exhausting and a douse on the fun that awaits you here, so I’ll try ‘n’ just hint at the riches within: a chunky piece of My Bloody Valentine’s-day psychocandy (“New Music Machine”) here, a tick-tockingly ticklish tribute to “Mick Jone-su” (“Clash”) there, a Hanna-Barbaric swatch of manic cartoon music (“Magoo Opening”), an audible channel-switch between two crystalline post-mod pop tunes (“Chapter 8 – Seashore and Horizon -,” featuring two members of the Apples in Stereo), and a climax featuring High Llama Sean O’Hagan’s banjo, a harmonica worthy of a Tom Petty (!!) song, and a dizzying spatter of rapid-fire self-referential samples from the rest of the album (“Thank You For The Music”) which segues into a gorgeous blush of Brian Wilsonesque harmony, the cough of the auteur, and then silence (the title track). And lest any of the above sound too retro-passive in summary, I should add that it’s all strung together in a thoroughly modern milieu of timely beats, hard-disk manipulations, and high-tech stereoscopic techno-colorings. In short (ahem), I’d be happily surprised if any other CD released this year gives me anywhere near the sustained, giddy pleasure that Fantasma does. Highly, highly recommended. Domo arigato, Mr. Cornelius.