Demob Happy

Another View Point

7/10

Keigo Oyamada - aka Cornelius - has a curious sound that is at once lush and acoustic, but proudly synthetic and occassionally a little sterile. Point’s mix of funky house, beach boy harmonies, garage rock and other electronic ephemera feels somehow both spontaneously breezy and painstakingly intricate. The digital production is so fine, so digitally clean you could eat off it, but is imbued with warmth and colour.

At its best, on ‘Brazil’, Point is a perfect fusion of pop and electronic abstraction that points (no pun intended) to the future. At others, like the hypnotic groove of ‘Drop’ it is hard to gauge whether it is just a nice idea repeated over and over. Arguably you have to be in a suitably sedate and sunny mood to appreciate songs like this, to let them wash over you. Cornelius seems to take - with a little tongue-in-cheek - some of the cliches of ambient music and imbue them with poppy playfullness. Sometimes, as on the closer ‘Nowhere’, Point strays too close to the Cafe Del Mar chill-out it purports to be more sophisticated than, while elsewhere he even manages to make rainforest effects sound fresh.

Arguably - while the mood of the album carries nicely as a whole - there aren’t enough truely stand-out tracks to make this a classic, but it is an engaging and atmospheric listen all the same. If you want something equally colourful and inventive from the land of the rising sun, try ooioo’s psych-rock masterpiece Gold and Green. Alternatively, you might enjoy the breezy vibes of Damon Albarn’s Mali Music, Bent’s ‘Everlasting Blink‘, or much of Fila Brazilia or Homelife’s quirky output.

Cornelius-brazil.mp3