Mellow Waves

Despite its calm demeanor, Mellow Waves is nearly as intricate as Cornelius' previous albums, and its masterful ebb and flow just gets richer with each listen.

Mellow Waves is the sound of an artist reaching a conclusion, one that is content with its place in music history as it is hopeful of the future.

He’s grown up, but he’s done so better than most, and crucially Mellow Waves hits you not just with ravishing sonics, but with a plangent heart, a sense of emotional growth that fulfils the promise Cornelius’s music has always had. [Aug 2017, p.57]

Opener If You’re Here is a perfect encapsulation of his art. Languorous, gentle, slightly off beat, its discordancy is offset by gorgeous harmonies sung with customary fragility by Oyamada. The rest of the album rides his well-established line between indie and electronica, with the quirk-heavy Sometime/Someplace and Helix/Spiral--a neat take on krautrock by way of Stereolab – providing the highlights.

Encouraged by the album's patience with time, it is easier to appreciate the lapse between albums when art of the highest quality such as Waves is created.

It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. ... But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface.

Don’t let the lightness of Mellow Waves fool you; its pleasures are substantive and lingering.

Mellow Waves doesn’t immediately grab your attention like some of Oyemada’s past work, but his careful attention to craft remains intact.

Although the sounds might be a bit dulled to the seasoned listener after 20 years of similar excursions, there are a few cuts here that deserve to be held up as classics in this sun-dappled sub-genre.

There's no mistaking this unpredictable, lovingly tended aural scenery for anything else. [No. 144, p.53]

Mellow Waves might be a strange bedfellow for the seminal albums of the year so far, but it’s a nonetheless unassumingly essential artifact.

There's little of the playful invention of 1997's astonishing Fantasma, but imaginative details abound, even at these slower tempos. [Sep 2017, p.24]

Cornelius’s mastery of the mix is still evident, but the album as a whole comes strangely across as a throwback to former glories rather than an expansion of an idiosyncratic universe.

Each taken singly can easily be appreciated, as they’re all gorgeous. But Mellow Waves as a whole is ultimately difficult to recall. Cornelius has certainly achieved the waves he was after, but the mellow winds up needing something more.

The album comes in light lapping waves of melodic song. It doesn’t wash you away, it doesn’t lure you in to your death. It’s a nice album.

It's unfair he no longer sounds unique. As a transmitter for cute. stylistic oddness, though, he remains staunch. [Sep 2017, p.96]

It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.