 This
one is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel: "Fantasma" is a well
regarded album everywhere, creating no small buzz for Cornelius
(known to his mother as Keigo Oyamda) and establishing the
international face of one of Japan's most important artists. Rolling
Stone Japan even named it as the tenth best Japanese album of all time
(right after The Sadistic Mika Band's Black Ship.) So why bother talking about it now?
Well, first off, this site is about Japanese rock history, and ignoring
the classics would be weird. Second, and this is important, the
majority of westerners who bought, heard, and loved this record are
most likely ignorant of the history behind the man who made it. This is
a shame, since knowing this deepens the perspective of the album in
small but significant ways. So let's get to that, shall we?
In 1989 Cornelius, going by his "real" name, started off with Flipper's Guitar,
a goof pop duo that rubbed shoulders with similarly minded UK
contemporaries like Momus, The Pastels, The Monochrome Set, Orange
Juice, and others. Flipper's Guitar, and later Cornelius himself, were
key players in the the Shibuya Kei movement, an early 90s group of
Tokyo based musicians who started off emulating classic French Pop, but
quickly expanded to include elements of more mainstream 60s
pop...pretty much anything that was catchy, sunny, and upbeat. While it
might be weird now to look at the current work of people like Puffy, Kahimi Karie, Pizzicato Five
and Cornelius and think that they belonged together in the same pop
worshiping scene, at the time they were united under the banner of what
Brian Wilson called Teenage Symphonies To God (well, OK, it's not weird
for Puffy...they pretty much stayed there.)
Keeping this in mind when listening to "Fantasma," the album makes a
subtle but nonetheless profound shift: what originally sounded like a
computer geek applying his talents to pop music is now the work of a
longtime classic pop geek exploring computers. Sorry if this sounds
pedantic, but suddenly tracks like "Chapter 8" and "New Music Machine"(live clip here)
are transformed from cut and paste wonders of catchiness into the sound
of a traditionally minded songwriter seeing what his studio can do,
like Oyamada's heroes Brian Wilson and The Beatles. It goes from being
an above average example of what was, at the time, a relatively new
phenomenon, to being a great reframing of a classic tradition, from
someone who already had the analog classics hard wired into his musical
DNA. It's this, more than just an ear for good tunes, that gives
Cornelius the juice that elevates "Fantasma" to the realm of classic.
"Crash," for all its manipulation, is at its heart more "Pet Sounds"
than anything else, a deceptively straightforward pop song that just
happens to have sonic textures that simply weren't available to
Cornelius' like minded predecessors. On the other extreme, opening
track "Mic Check"
is a head clearer: the initial burst of random studio noise sets the
outside boundaries and cleanses the palate to highlight the
pop/experimental fusion that follows. Near the end of the album, "Thank
You For The Music" (not an ABBA cover) fuses the fusions, patching
together previous moments and driving the point home: this is
traditional pop spliced into the modern world.
In fact, catchy as the more traditional pop songs are, it's when
Cornelius strays from those traditions that "Fantasma" is at it's most
intriguing. "Count Five Or Six" and "Free Fall" take two elements...the repetitiveness and visceral whomp
of pop...and distill them to an unadorned and borderline uncomfortable
purity, letting the tracks push their way into your psyche with a
single minded force that even classic pop music didn't have, or even
really attempt. They make "Louie Louie" seem baroque in comparison.
It would take four years for Cornelius to follow up with a
from-the-ground-up new album (1998's "CM" was remixes,) and while
"Point" was impressive, it didn't quite have the same balance between
pure pop and whiplash inducing stylistic shifts that make "Fantasma" so
impressive even now, over a decade later. He's still at it...last year
saw the release of the excellent "Sensuous..." but "Fantasma" is, thus
far, the high water mark.
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Available through Amazon US as a CD and download
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