#18: May 2022
#18: May 2022
the best Mandopop of the month from West by West's experimental electronic music to vacation-ready R&B to notes on the Golden Melody Awards
Taiwan’s biggest music award show, the Golden Melody Awards, is set to be held July 2, 2022, so for this month’s issue I’ve put together a rundown of five highlights:
The year’s biggest nominee is Tanya Chua, up for eight awards including Album and Song of the Year for her eighteenth solo studio album DEPART and “Bluebirds.” It follows the Golden Melody Awards’ trend of highlighting industry veterans—Soft Lipa and Hebe Tien last year, Joanna Wang, Waa Wei, and Sodagreen’s Wu Qingfeng the year before—so rarely does the award show stray from veteran acts. It’s a bit disappointing in this case since Chua’s DEPART is some of the least interesting output she’s had in years. While there’s a grace to it, it feels hollowed where previous singer-songwriter works like 2007’s Goodbye & Hello or 2011’s Sing It Out of Love succeeded. Aside from Chua, Waa Wei’s up for seven nominations for her great Have A Nice Day, while former F.I.R singer Faye and legendary Chinese art rock star Cui Jian are up for four nominations each.
Looking at KKBox’s 2021 year-end chart, some of the big songs make it: EggPlantEgg’s “Oh Love, You Are Much Greater Than I Imagined” and WeiBird’s “Red Scarf” both score Song of the Year nominations. Yet newer pop acts are lost: Ivy, who aligns closer with the idol dance-pop, receives zero nominations while Qiu Fengze, Nine Chen, and Wayne Huang, despite their widespread popularity on the charts and as hosts of the variety show 100% Entertainment and making the same classic Mandopop ballads, are completely excluded from the nominee list. Instead the newer acts seem to be those more influenced by R&B, soul, and hip-hop, including Jerry Li in Album of the Year, Karencici and Tia Ray in Best Female Mandarin Singer, Shadow Project in Best Vocal Group, and L8ching and Haezee for Best New Artist. Some of these artists might see themselves on the chart, including Shadow Project for their lovely emo-rap ballad “Love Song 2020” but the nominations for these artists are perhaps more representative of better reception for these genres across Taiwan.
The Song of the Year category is perhaps some of the dullest in years. Taiwan’s preference for ballads is on full display here and to a lesser extent in the composition and lyric categories. “Dear Grandma” is fine but not the best single from Waa Wei’s album, while Lala Hsu’s “None of the Above” is much more interesting than “Prototype” yet the former is only nominated for Producer of the Year while the latter takes a nomination for Song of the Year. The sole rap song on the list, “DEATH TRIP” is from two artists who have a history of being nominated, and while fine, feels like evidence the show still doesn’t quite understand the country’s rap scene. Apart from that, there’s more ballads, including from Tanya Chua and Ayugo Huang, film pieces from EggPlantEgg and WeiBird and for some reason, the Namewee and Kimberley Chen collaboration.
This year also sees a larger number of nominations for artists from China. Xu Jun, Jude Chiu, and Cui Jian are up for Best Male Mandarin Singer, Tia Ray’s up for Best Female Mandarin Singer, and the 18-year-old Matt Lv is up for Best New Artist. It’s up to four artists from last year’s lone nomination for Tan Weiwei for Best Female Mandarin Singer, likely due to the impact of “Xiao Juan.” It’s a strange group of artists but justified for the most part—Cui Jian’s been established as a legendary figure in Chinese rock, Xu Jun’s up for his second nomination after a nomination for Best Mandarin Album for 2016’s Million Songs Hill, and Tia Ray’s crossover potential was bound to capture Taiwan’s attention—but Matt Lv’s nomination perhaps points to Taiwan paying closer attention to the newcomers in China’s scene. And perhaps in one of the most surprising nominations, sunwoojunga is up for a nomination for Best Composer her duet with Waa Wei.
Lastly, the Best Vocal Group category is probably the most interesting, in a sort of “what’s going on?” kind of way: you’ve got The Dinosaur’s Skin’s (the gimmicky project where they just put on dinosaur heads) three-song EP against the rap trio Shadow Project, old timers New Formosa Band and Power Station, the indie-rock group Vast & Hazy, and the thrilling cacophony of noise presented by Sam-Seng-Hiàn-Gē. And apparently they’re all different from bands!
The nominees are definitely worth checking out and you can check out the list of nominees here. This month we’re back to the regular, with writing about the new West by West album and mostly R&B singles from Edison Song, RED, and AJ Lai. Check out this month’s playlist here.
Albums
West By West - Hot Water Music
The songs of Hot Water Music arrive like a slow boil. Sometimes, they cohere into a foggy atmosphere, thick and filled with tension. Sometimes, they come only partly rendered, each element readily apparent in the mix. On these, West by West takes the mundane apart, testing each piece to see what kind of heat she can pull out of the perceived coldness of ordinary life. She experiments across it, letting piano lines exist individually, without the need to complement one another. She’ll clink metal and play with synth sounds. She’ll repeat her lines until they mean something.
West by West—the moniker of solo electronic musician Wang XiXi—crafted heavy atmospheres on her self-titled debut, bringing an air of tradition despite being created mostly with modern electronic instrumentation. The opener, “一切重新开始” (“Everything Starts Over”), might sound like a continuation of that sound but her vocals refute the underlying passionate desperation. An observation about the routine cycle of life is more spoken than sung with her unwavering indifference. “It never stops, it never fades away, it’s just started, it’s starting again,” she listlessly intones.
If the mundane lies in that repetition, then West by West attempts to break these cycles into smaller pieces. She searches for meaning in relationships on “相互作用力” (“Interaction Force”), wondering what it is that draws us towards another. “You don’t love the peacock, you just love its feathers,” she states pointedly, as if you could only love what you see of yourself in another. She uses variations in her music to do the same, from ones that eclipse her voice, like the distortions that drown her voice on the dizzyingly intense “波斯地毯” (“Persian Rug”), to more minute ones, like how she sways back and forth between the commands to “create sounds on the body” and “splatter flames on the body” on “心形伤疤” (“Heart-Shaped Scar”).
West by West is at her most introspective when she questions the mundanity. On the stark “妈妈为什么我不快乐” (“Mom, Why Am I Not Happy”), each element moves separately from another. The second piano line dances to a different piece while the first keeps its time unevenly. Both stand apart from the track’s airy static. Yet she remains at the centre, breaking from her listless stupor with a wailed, “mom, please tell me,” before rattling off questions with no answers: “how moving must a movie be? how strong should a hug be? how warm can the sun shine in the afternoon? how happy can a love be?” By deconstructing the song into its pieces she allows each melody, each deviation, and each question to be raised with unwavering resolve.
On Hot Water Music, West by West takes the mundane apart, but importantly also puts it back together. By “我在梦里拥有你” (“In My Dreams I Hold You”), she regains that sense of atmosphere, yet never sees an answer to her questions, instead, on the closer “老孩子” (“Old Child”) she babbles away in its darkness. West by West cycles through life and finds no deep meaning. She deconstructs and reconstructs it and yet the best she can do is carve her name the way a bored student would on their desk, attempting to leave her mark on this ordinary fraction of a moment in “到此一游” (“We Were Here”), dancing and clanging metallic utensils on its bubbling acidity. Fittingly, Howie Lee meets her there with a saxophone solo that’s just as inessential, lazily strung together in its moment before she closes with a demoed dance beat, the two diverging and West by West moving forward in her own mundane cycle.
Find it on streaming here1: Apple Music
Songs
AJ Lai - “Suffocation City”
For much of “Suffocation City” it just feels like experiencing a lack of belonging. It feels like a grand exaggeration when he wonders on the first verse: “can you take me out with one shot?” Yet “Suffocation City” generates motion by building a variety of textures—propulsive pop-rock, R&B vocals, spacey electronic production—and when Lai starts rapping on the second verse, you finally get an understanding of how the city might smother you. “I’m trying to get back the V at the corner of my mouth, I don’t want anything else, I just wanna breathe,” he buzzes. He twists and turns through the city only to find himself at the same starting point, the same endless exhaustion, the same desire it’s always been: “I just need someone to tell me, ‘I’m waiting for you.’”
Find AJ Lai’s Moments EP on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
see also: Zunya - “Disappeared” // ΛTLΛNTIX - “OㄡO (feat. Auztin & LCY)”
RED - “Moon Party”
“We just have a good mood and get in the moon party,” RED sings over the track’s tropical dance beat. Like a commercial, RED redirects your sight to the most enjoyable parts of life (a vacation with friends, a sunny resort, a good time by the pool) dancing around the word period. She sees parts as unavoidable but others as unavoidable, stopping in the first verse to call, “hold the invitation, we’re just having fun.” Most of the cheesiness that should be in “Moon Party” is offset by what RED offers even if the fact that it was written for and sponsored by period pants makes its “empowerment”—the “be the boss or the princess”—perhaps a bit hokey.
Edison Song - “景美 (feat. Kuo)”
Edison Song’s music career has mostly been shaped by a sort of reluctance to the standard route, he diverged from any path to stardom by following a three-track EP last year with a set of jazzy piano compositions. His latest, “景美” (“Jingmei”) is characterized by that same kind of reluctance: at its peak where it should climax, Song pulls back, enjoying the track’s vibe rather than going for something larger. “景美” attempts to piece together his thoughts. “I turned around and looked, the light always leaves a part out and the further you go the deeper you sink,” he sings, his arrangement following him into the darker side. But when the arrangement fills with dizzying stars, Song recollects himself. He repeats the same intentions with the same scenery: “I’m still looking out the window, I’m back here again with doubts.” This time it builds back a bit differently, the electric guitar taking more of the mix. He remains a passenger on a circular path, arranging his music to float on the surface and prevent himself from sinking too deep.
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.
Unfortunately, Hot Water Music is not available on Spotify… hopefully, just currently. You can find a stream of the album with commentary by West by West on NetEase Cloud Music. Additionally, you can stream West by West’s self-titled debut on Spotify here and stream a performance of “到此一游” below: