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Review: 'Serph'
'Plus Ultra'   

-  Album: 'Plus Ultra' -  Label: 'Nobel Lable'
-  Genre: 'Dance'

Our Rating:
It takes some hellish audacity to have a ‘best of’ collection out within seven years of your first album. ‘Plus Ultra’ is an updated ‘best of’, which takes such audacity to a whole new level. But that’s Serph for you, and perhaps there’s justification for a bit of egotism: his debut album, ‘Accidental Tourist’ was released in 2009, with only three years of experience playing the piano and composing. Its follow-up, ‘Vent’, sold over 20,000 copies, and his prodigious work-rate has seen the emergence of a further three albums. Yet for all of this, we know very little about Serph beyond the fact that it’s a solo project of a guy from Tokyo, and that he also records as Reliq and is one half of N-qia with female vocalist Nozomi.

‘Plus Ultra’ features material from 2015’s ‘Hyperion Suites’, selected and reworked by Serph, and augmented with a brace of new tracks, which we’re assured as ‘destined to be Serph classics’. He’s not lacking in confidence, that’s for sure. Or musical ability, for that matter: the piano-led pieces are laced with strings, strolling basslines, swinging grooves and boast accessible mellifluous melodies.

There are clear Oriental influences, as well as contemporary electronica, as manifested in the danceable beats. But there’s something a little ostentatious and overtly muso about it all, particularly in the noodlesome whistly synth lines and self-consciously complex time signatures. While the way Serph pulls a wide range of sounds together is interesting, the end result is a bit muzak.

author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Serph - Plus Ultra