#21: August 2022
the best Mandopop of the month from GONG's eerie labyrinthine apocalypse to the Mandopop pop-punk revival to goofy rap crews
G.E.M.’s eighth studio album, Revelation, is set with great ambitions: a visual double-album comprised of seven tracks to each side, titled Letters to Heaven and Letters from Heaven. High-budget videos titled “chapters” are released every Tuesday and Friday, together exploring ideas of dystopian future, the metaverse, and faith.
Others have explore the first two ideas but never on this level of storytelling, often leaving it to high-concept imagery. Akini Jing’s exploration was surreal depictions of modernity; Sharon Kwan pulled Karencici into a dystopian apocalypse and later Lexie Liu would do something similar with more industrial props and supernatural world jumping. Singaporean artist Jasmine Sokko’s been one of the biggest proponents of that futuristic aesthetic from her cover artwork to her stylish music videos. G.E.M. feels like the first to explore such ambitious cross-medium storytelling.
First chapter “GLORIA,” the lead to second disc Letters from Heaven, frames the narrative of Revelation: elements of gospel are directly embedded in the chorus as she sings to a past version of herself: “Gloria, there is no fear in love, my love is like an unending flow that will wash away your scars.” If the religious imagery wasn’t already apparent from that lyric, its music video plays it heavy-handedly with the end finding G.E.M. walking towards a door as the sea parts before her.
Revelation is centred on G.E.M.’s faith, its lyrics not a needy call for a stranger but questions and prayers to a higher being. On “Solitude,” she ponders, “if I’m overburdened by my struggles, can I be granted an embrace?,” later on the chorus requesting, “be by my side, can you just keep me company for one night?” Letters to Heaven opens in opposition to creation: the depiction of a metaverse as an escape from a failed relationship.
G.E.M. is best musically when she walks the gray area and sees her faith wavering. “Solitude” is pleasantly insular R&B, a shadow of doubt as G.E.M. prays for support. GONG makes something of “Young Man & Sea” where he couldn’t with the awkward choruses of “Gloria” or “Hell,” casting further doubts in the muted explosion of genres, replete with thrumming danger and devilish vocals. Most thrilling though is “Passion” where G.E.M. outright questions God: “accusations have never died, their joy is built on other’s graves… keyboard terrorists hiding behind their computers, ferocious faces to my digust, what the fuck? My merciful Father, wouldn’t you have rage?” G.E.M.’s pent-up rage is the ugliest her voice has ever sounded, cast into the shadows of Tai Yi’s haunted carnival of a production as she expounds her rage.
G.E.M.’s ambition has made Revelation interesting even where some of its earlier tracks have been met with more mixed reception. As the second half of the album rolls out, it’s a wonder if G.E.M. will offer more surprises by way of “Passion” or if she’ll continue to play it predictably, to offer exactly what the promotional press has made of a painfully self-righteous journey to faith.
One last farewell to The Singles Jukebox: this newsletter wouldn’t exist if I never got a start in writing for The Singles Jukebox. The Jukebox demonstrated that curiosity was always rewarded. I think that’s especially relevant to writing about a scene that tends to go undervalued like Mandopop—there’s so often great rewards within its many subscenes and a little curiosity can go a long way into uncovering it. Part of it is understanding your starting point: lack of knowledge about the scene shouldn’t preclude you from listening or writing about it—approaching Chinese rock by Western parallels can be enlightening so long as you understand your limitations as a listener and approach it with an open mind.
In the three years I was around to write for The Singles Jukebox, we covered three Chinese songs. I picked Julia Wu’s “七十億分之一加一 (feat. SHOU)” back in 2020 for Amnesty Week but last year, we also covered Taiwanese band EggPlantEgg’s “Oh Love, You Are Much Greater Than I Imagined” and Terence Lam’s “Virgo” for Reader’s Week last year (realized I accidentally mistranslated that last line, my bad). Digging back further will find more Chinese coverage than anywhere else on the Internet: the indie-cred of Joanna Wang, the meme-d “Chick Chick” by Wang Rong, and bafflingly high-scoring Z.TAO. But my favourite set was Jolin Tsai’s “Ugly Beauty” which had that understanding and curiosity (and one of the funniest one-liners I’ve read) that I think will go unmatched in music criticism, Chinese or otherwise. I’ll love the Jukey forever.
I’m out in list-making mode for the rest of the year so apologies if coverage shrinks a bit. This year I’m aiming to make good on what I said I would do last year in making a reader’s poll, so this is a statement to a) make myself do it and b) provide you with time if you want to contribute. It’ll probably just be a Google Form where you can add top ten singles, top five albums and a comment if you like. I’ll do an aggregate but also might post each ballot as is if there are enough people interested. I don’t know, I’m still figuring it out.
This month I wrote about albums by Ann Bai and GONG. (A little NSFW warning on the GONG album cover since someone’s got their naked butt out on the cover.) Lastly, some singles by Summer Jike, the Taiwanese crew ΛTLΛNTIX, and NICKTHEREAL.
Albums
Ann Bai - All About You
All About You is a bit of a misnomer. Even when Ann Bai tends to change who exactly the “you” refers to—a man in love with someone else, a best friend she watches walk down the aisle in the Andes—these songs are often more about her than they are about that “you.” Take the title track: “seeing that you have feelings for someone else,” she sings on halfway through the first verse before turning it back on herself, “it turns out the love that fascinates me most is the one I can’t have.” Bai describes the song as also being for fans despite being a torch song so bent on wanting someone else’s attention. “No one’s written a song for you, right? This is the only thing I can do for you,” she sings before rattling off a list of styles she’s mastered. “As long as you can remember me, it’s like being loved.” A tragic statement that’s so much more about Bai than anyone else.
Throughout All About You, Ann Bai leans into the adult contemporary of Mandopop, a collection of tender songs that often yearn like its torch song title track. While Bai writes these elegant melodies that put shape before the tonality of the language, the tracks are often made more interesting by the arrangements: “All About You” opens with a synth and piano line like a cinematic sunset, then a chorus that blooms open like a spring day, the subtle crescendo of drums and piano. Xu Jun’s arrangement on “Losing Touch” effectively highlights the danger of the pair’s compromise: “you do your thing, I’ll do my thing, we’ll gradually drift apart. you understand my hardships and I’ll forgive your shortcomings.” They make the idea sound beautiful—a relationship where neither party sacrifices their independence but Xu’s arrangement always feels off-kilter, a syncopated rhythmic guitar that leaves too much emptiness to be desirable. Its key change feels like an attempt at saving what remains even if the pair can already feel the space as irreparable.
Bai writes characters that are easily replaceable. On “Personal Issue,” she digs deeper into the introspection on this grand melody: “liking a person of course is a personal issue, it has nothing to do with you,” she sings, later confessing that she’ll handle it on her own. She loves simply for the pleasure of it, revelling in the fantasy she projects upon another. Only on “Sunset by the Andes” does Bai make a character other than herself feel like an actual person, a letter of gratitude to someone who manages to remain in Bai’s life.
Though the swooning melodies and carefully imaginative arrangements colour All About You towards its end, they fall a bit short. “White” dresses her melody with a simple piano melody that can feel a bit plodding. Meanwhile, the Xu Jun production of “Warm Light” finds Bai meandering in someone else’s melody underneath the blanket of its guitar arrangement until about four minutes in. While it grows into something intense, the cooed interjections feel at a loss rather than an expression of wonderment.
Bai pretends to write songs for others as a means of better understanding herself through her period of confusion. The indie-rock of the electric guitar riffs underneath “Special” casts aside the easy and familiar as less a means of vilifying an unnamed partner and more about finding her as someone fussy and wanting: “if it’s not special enough, I don’t want it; if you don’t love me enough, I don’t want it.” Through its romantic torch songs and tender gratitude, All About You is a disentangling of Bai’s ideals of love. She sifts through the temporary fantasies and the long-term relationships and eventually, embraces the confusion to settle into something familiar and comfortable.
Find it on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “White” // “All About You” // “Just Good Enough”
GONG - The age of sundogs
GONG’s always been withdrawn in his public persona. He started as a behind-the-scenes producer for the idols, including TFBoys and Z.TAO but GONG seems to have withdrawn from any limelight after being placed on equal ground with idols. A scene where GONG follows rapper Jony J off The Collaboration was met with a lot of negative attention from fans of its idol artists but the pair never made sense when grouped together with the likes of members of SEVENTEEN, PENTAGON, and others who had trained under the idol trainee system. GONG’s withdrawal has been somewhat apparent since, even as he constantly releases a stream of music, his presence on social media is limited. Radio silence followed the promise of his fourth album being out before the end of the year back in December and its delays seemed like a product of someone stuck in their head rather than anything unfinished.
I tend to think of circular loops when I think of GONG—the exhausting feeling of running in circles, the feeling of being stuck—even though that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Perhaps his debut was characterized by loops, like the shrill festival of “Where My Cell Phone At” that found GONG confused as its festival goers seemed to blur into one circle. Those loops have even found themselves beyond his debut album, including “Roof on Fire,” the track he produced for f(x)’s Victoria Song, or “Tokyo” featuring waa wei off his second album. These circles seem to spell disorientation and torment and on “Tokyo,” waa wei’s voice comes as a ghostly pattern as she sings in the shadows of GONG’s production.
Away from the circles, GONG is still creating tracks built on disorienting patterns and claustrophobic confines. “Help!!!” off his third album is more literal about it, its dirty guitar line changing into a swampy instrumental as he slurs the question, “who will save me?” On “Lost in a Train” off his latest album, GONG finds himself trapped in a less literal prison: a repeated sample of “I always thought you would be someone I could trust” that cuts through the sinister atmosphere. A sticky bass line, rapper Ingrita’s appearance, a turn halfway through her verse—GONG can’t shake off that voice, as his head swallows Ingrita into a scream buried in the background. The age of sundogs carries on the labyrinthine structures of Coming Soon. It pushes each motif, like that looped vocal sample or the dry flickers of “A Leaf” until they no longer work, then bends the structure like Coming Soon closer “1.3KM” did, just threatening to transform into a drum ‘n’ bass track before retreating, or as “City of Clones” does when it morphs into a pop-punk song underneath GONG and Guibian’s deep growl.
There’s a myriad of apocalyptic scenes drawn by GONG, tied together only by an eerie atmosphere that pervades The age of sundogs. “Lost in a Train” demonstrates it with its winding hallways that feel like they stretch endlessly while opener, “I’m a Volunteer,” uses rolling drums to recall the noir aesthetics of Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence. On the sleazy romance of its central diptych, GONG comes out of his shell a bit, dancing underneath the synth stabs of “Human World Will Remain the Same” and offering a seductively mysterious question of “how will we spend the night?” as the world collapses in “When the Dark Clouds Burn.” It’s a captivating offer, to spend the last night dancing underneath its lounge-bar atmosphere—GONG adding a touch of complexity to the piano line that wouldn’t have been present on his debut—but there’s a siren blaring at the background of the end of the track that makes you question how long it’s been warning the pair of you.
GONG’s apocalypse is all in his head. The age of sundogs blinds you from the left and right to make its worldview shrink. “Assimilate me,” GONG begs as “I’m a Volunteer” shifts, but it’s all drowned out in the crowd, transformed into a storm of zombies. As he obsesses over the question “who do I exist for?” on “City of Clones” it makes it clear that The age of sundogs is stuck in one mental prison. When the refracted light disappears, nothing has changed. The world GONG saw on fire is a temporary illusion, the crowd is a crowd and nothing more. As The age of sundogs finds its exit through its ambitious labyrinth of ghostly voices and twisting production, GONG finds himself changed, settling somewhere yet deciding to live differently: “be lighthearted without sinking into your vices, leave regrets until death.”
Find it on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “I’m a Volunteer”
Singles
Summer Jike - “Trendy Energy Surge Warning”
Fashioning a propulsive retro wave, Summer Jike’s latest single comes titled with a warning, despite the fact that it’s less concerned with others and more about pleasure. Each word sounds like the ultimate delight: she stretches the words “not loud enough” like she’s waiting for the climax and then lets the words of the chorus—“the sensual world of pleasures! the style! the attitude!”—dance on the tip of her tongue. Jike lets all of “Trendy Energy Surge Warning” go to her head, excited with the teeming life under its subdued exterior, satisfied to soak in the attention when it does just as enthusiastically meet her with satisfied coos on the post-chorus.
ΛTLΛNTIX - “100 SAMURAI”
The biggest group on Taiwan’s indie music platform StreetVoice is surprisingly ΛTLΛNTIX (ATLANTIS), a six-man crew that gained popularity after competing on this year’s Taiwanese idol competition, ATOM BOYZ (probably more on this in a later issue). Two of its members, Auztin and Sean Ko, debuted in ATOM BOYZ URANUS, the winning group, while SuMMeR debuted in ATOM BOYZ EARTH, the runner-up group. Though the show was scheduled for broadcast last year, ΛTLΛNTIX formed behind-the-scenes in its delay, their music informed by the idol training from the show but helmed by their own independent aspirations.
ΛTLΛNTIX spent this summer doling out starry-eyed romantic songs, with titles like “有了妳我還耍什麼酷” (“With You, Why Do I Need to Act Cool”) and “I Love You in Every Universe.” “100 SAMURAI” pivots, borrowing more from ATOM BOYZ URANUS, taking its hard braggadocious rap style and blaring electronic elements. The part that is sung by Auztin doesn’t retain any of its romantic sensibilities, instead swirling together like a soupy mix of autotune and warnings. At times, it’s some of the hardest tough-guy posturing Taiwan has put out this year, all flashing lights and amped up verses, only made more aggressive when contrasted with its slurry of vocals. And at other times, if you look beyond their facade it’s endearingly goofy teenage stupidity: “it’s all about the gap between dummy and dumpling,” J.Lee raps somewhere in the midst of all its raving gibberish.
see also: ATOM BOYZ URANUS - “Level UP”
NICKTHEREAL - “我做的是愛不是夢”
Pop punk is making a comeback in China and Taiwan. It’s small but it’s embedding itself into the scenes at different points, through different styles. Goatak of famous Taiwanese label Rock Records approached somewhere in the middle of summer and it felt like waking up from a depressive episode as he switched away from his emo-punk. TRASH enlisted PIZZALI, Howard Lee, Vicky Chen, and G5SH for an electronic remix on their poppiest pop punk track from last year’s Holy Trip! In China, former, or perhaps, still idol, Lil Ghost goes full pop punk after remixing a couple of his own tracks in the style with the pop punk DEADLINE while outside the mainstream, jiafeng mixes his trademark weirdness into an absolute headache of a track in the best sense.
NICKTHEREAL’s “我做的是愛不是夢” (“I’m Making Love, Not a Dream”) is the only pop punk track that hints at pop punk’s nostalgia through its brightly coloured early 2000s aesthetics, all implying that NICKTHEREAL understands the genre. Every diversion away from pop punk’s tropes are then deliberate, the shadow of a gravelly rasp that’s assuaged, the chorus’ lack of rowdiness, the lyrical pivot away from coveted desires. He’s not looking for a rebellion like Lil Ghost attempts to raise, instead aiming to conform, finally hoping to be exactly what someone else is looking for. It’s all about putting in the work as he sings on the chorus about trying to be there, about showing up: “this time I’ll be sincere and won’t deceive you, this time win or lose isn’t the end.” “我做的是愛不是夢” is about going home. NICKTHEREAL stakes everything on that, not some magic formula, not some instantaneous event but a promise that he’ll work to make it last, tempering all the extremes until it rings true, then delivering it outside your bedroom with one final electric chorus.
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.