Fantasma

CORNELIUS

Fantasma (Matador)

WELCOME TO the out-of-its-gourd world of Cornelius (named after the hairy hero of Planet Of The Apes), a Japanese wonderboy intent on zapping your synapses with an album of experimental spazz-pop such as you haven’t heard since, well, never.

A star in his native country, where he’s selling out stadiums and bamboozling all and sundry with Residents-style visual trickery, ol’ Corny makes the most avant garde of western artists sound like Embrace. Which is not to say he’s unlistenable. No, on tracks like ‘The Micro Disneycal World Tour’ and ‘Chapter 8 – Seashore and Horizon’ he updates methods previously used by The Beatles (at their most daring) or the Beach Boys (the celestial symphonics of ‘Good Vibrations’) and chucks them into a blender with bits of Lee Ranaldo, off-the-rack hip-hop beats and anything else that happens to be lying around the Asian version of the 7-Eleven.

Previous reviewers have tagged this guy as a kind of demented channel-hopper, and it’s a parallel worth repeating here. Cornelius suffers from a severely truncated attention span, barely able to settle on one style, or even time signature, for more than 40 seconds at a time. The result is kind of like John Zorn re-interpreting Beck’s back catalogue. A little too impressed with its own cleverness at times, but rarely less than fascinating.

Although Cornelius specialises in using sounds wrenched out of context, yet there isn’t a single sample on the entire album. Okay, so sometimes one yearns for a good old-fashioned groove (the lovely ‘Clash’ is cruelly cut off in its prime by a the sound of a needle being yanked off a record – has this guy had too many M&Ms or what?) but Fantasma is rarely tedious. Indeed, the cartoon bedlam of ‘Magoo Opening’ is convoluted enough to give most conventional players, never mind listeners, heart-attacks.

If nothing else, Cornelius will certainly give your stereo a run for its money. Genius or magpie? I cannot decide, but Fantasma certainly merits serious investigation.

Peter Murphy