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“Mellow Waves is a 2017 studio album by Japanese musician Cornelius. It was released in Japan by Warner Music and in the United States by Rostrum Records. The album, which received generally positive reviews from music critics, reached the top ten of Japan's Oricon albums chart and the US Dance/Electronic Album Sales chart.” – Wiki

“On his first proper album in over a decade, the meticulous pop experimenter known as Cornelius arrives floating on the promised Mellow Waves of its title. Gentle guitars and soft-hued synths sustain a mood of a familiar but far-flung locale: a veneer of artistic maturity that camouflages the brilliant and ambitious playfulness of the 48-year-old former guitarist Keigo Oyamada’s music. Known for the wild, kaleidoscopic pastiche of 1997’s Fantasma, Oyamada’s Cornelius continues to specialize in creating moments of startling fun, even if his sonic palette isn’t always as show-offy and sugar-coated as it once was. It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. The jazzy exotica of the opening “If You’re Here” sounds so much like pop that Oyamada’s deconstructed arrangement flits by almost unnoticed. But it is music no one else could make. Oyamada’s hyperactive early albums, representative of Tokyo’s cut-and-paste Shibuya-kei scene of the mid-’90s, led to a career defined not by novelty but an evolving compositional voice. While bloops skittered across a vast bleep grid on 2002’s Point and bright grooves dominated 2006’s Sensuous, Mellow Waves aims itself at the glowing emotional core of Oyamada’s retro-futuristic soundworld;” – Pitchfork

“Mellow Waves finds Cornelius in a meditative mode, simultaneously slowing down to take in Tokyo's incessant flow but still tweaking the fluorescent glow. You can hear it almost immediately on the album's opener, "If You're Here," a slow-jam with tremolo-heavy keyboards, sparse percussion, and a clipped guitar solo that is at once lost and broken and pointed. It's immediately one of Cornelius' most stirring songs partly because, for the first time, Oyamada allows his voice to be the melody instead of an abstract instrument bent to his will. It's also the first time he's introduced other perspectives to Cornelius; the lyrics to "If You're Here" and the twinkling "Dear Future Person" were written by psych-pop musician Shintaro Sakamoto. A distant cousin of Oyamada's — Miki Berenyi from the British noise-pop band Lush — also sings her own English-language lyrics for a woozy lullaby, "The Spell Of A Vanishing Loveliness."” – NPR

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