10 Cero – Poly Life Multi Soul (Indie Pop, Downtempo)

Inspired by a classically-styled city-pop and Shibuya-kei spirit, Cero made one of the year’s best retro-futurist projects. A proud member of a long lineage of that type of album to come from Japan. Much as their fellow countrymen had blended up ye-ye and tropicália throughout the 90’s, Cero blend-up soul grooves and harmonies before pouring them into the open mouth of downtempo, and nu-jazz, all while being presented as a fresh dose of alternative r&b. If your head is starting to spin at the thought of that, then you’re starting to get the fun of it. Poly Life Multi Soul is a journey into absurdity as much as it is a journey into warm summer evenings. The radiant warmth of it’s slow-jam atmosphere never clearing despite it’s bizarre instrumental flairs, and equally strange song breaks and turns.

Highlights include the jazzy hip-hop breaks of “At Night The Salmon Move”, which evokes the very highs of a modern lo-fi hip-hop artists like Joji with an almost effortless swing. Busting up the lazy monotony of the genre by twisting it into the creative fusion of Cero’s world as it segues, not into more monotone moods, but into a flamboyant piece of electro-funk.

Where many of their genre-space peers fail by locking too deeply into sleepy grooves and singular emotions, Cero excel by moving wherever the natural progression takes them. Always onto the next, and then the next…