#22: September 2022
#22: September 2022
the best Mandopop of the month from Yo Lee's twisting dream-pop to Crispy's indie-pop exploration of love to the return of the Mandopop ballads
Mandopop is back baby.
Some of the past two year’s most creative output feels almost like a direct product of the pandemic—as claustrophobia loomed heavy, artists took advantage of that atmosphere: Diana Wang crafted last year’s “Make You Feel” like an extended reprieve from that mood while others like drogas and Julia Wu turned introspective, capturing the confines with the feeling of nervousness and emptiness respectively.
Younger artist were quick to adapt but Taiwan’s most established seemed to take it as a period of rest. They didn’t completely stop: some like Hebe Tien and Tanya Chua released albums, and there was never a shortage of one-off soundtrack singles. But now, the “real singers” have return and the ballad album is back.
This is a roundup of this year’s “classic” Mandopop albums from a set of industry veteran balladeers, a showcase that demonstrates that Mandopop really has returned:
A-Lin explores her relationships with the her world on her tenth studio album, LINK. I wrote about “ROMADIW” earlier this year, a celebratory track that reconciles with her Amis heritage but “Flower” is one of the best Mandopop tracks of the year, a rapid introduction to A-Lin as she runs through her life, ten years at a time. The ballads lean more intimate that those two reminiscing on relationships (“Blame”) and friendships (“Vacation Sisters” / “Best Friend”).
Lala Hsu’s sixth studio album, Gei (or Give), opens with two of the best singles of the year: “Like a Star,” which blends house and city-pop and the gorgeous R&B ballad “Break Off (feat. ABAO & Brandy).” After that, Gei gets a bit rocky. The problem lies in how its ballads seem to meander and that Gei doesn’t work quite as cohesively as LINK does, a scattershot sampling of genres like the art pop of “None of the Above” and its title track or the acoustic singer-songwriter nature of “Care for You.” More house pop like “The Lion” next time, please!
The ballads of Ann Bai’s All About You are cautious when it comes to love, hoping to maintain some sense of independence within a relationship. So does Yisa Yu’s “Let You Go” off her seventh album, Dear Life, which opens with the lines: “I never lacked anyone’s admiration / ‘alone’ was already my label,” only to rehash that first line at the end, its melody left hanging in the air. On “Let You Go,” Yu is the romanticist even as she pretends not to be, singing lines adorned with Chinese idioms, the fixation on independence revealed to be a mask by its end. But the rest of Dear Life sounds like Yisa Yu the romanticist. Even as she heads towards a breakup on last year’s great “A Seat,” she ends with the idea of restarting a relationship. Dear Life pushes her sound with the funky rhythm of “Painful Delight” and the jazzy flourishes of “Romance” but Yu’s still never sounded as good as she does on “Let You Go.”
Memorable Moments, Pets Tseng’s fourth album, revels in its own bubble. She remains ever the optimist on it, singing as if she’s happy just to love and be loved. Take for example, the title track where producers William Wei and Aven Tsai bring a studio polish to the singer-songwriter composition, like a commercial sheen to her perfect bubble of a life. Speaking of Wei, he returns with his seventh studio album under the stage name WeiBird, his best in a long while (especially considering his lacklustre completely English album from last year), a collection of mostly acoustic singer-songwriter tracks. Both Memorable Moments and WeiBird’s Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Goodnight are pleasantly fresh although Pets Tseng’s obsessive “My Heart Belongs to You” and WeiBird’s tragic “Suddenly” are dark outliers and also some of each’s best work.
Christine Fan has her thirteenth album, Solitary Moment, and while its title seems to allude to the past few years, it doesn’t aim to push her sound. It feels like a simple collection of ballads she’s put together over the past few years, a salve if you need it. Claire Kuo and Victor Wong do the same things with their new EPs, and Rachel Liang looks like she’s shaping up to do something similar with her seventh studio album, She Matters out later this month. All of which is pleasant but pretty unsubstantial.
Penny Tai, the vocalist of Buddha Jump, follows the same idea as the above artists, music as a salve, but her twelfth studio album, The Passive Audience, makes more use of space where others were more focused on the voice. At times, the space can feel a bit frustrating, like on the title track where she leaves you hanging as the track doesn’t really bloom into something more fruitful. The strength of The Passive Audience is to present something simple, perhaps a little swing or country influence, with her ballads revealing their tumultuous complexity upon close listening: on lead single “Thanks to You,” she passes off quarantine woes with a cheery outlook but the strain in her voice can’t help but feel forced. There are layers of worry, bitterness, and gratitude as she turns over the questions on the chorus: “do you still love me? do you still remember the person I was?”
Finally, it’s not only the women who have returned to their roots. Kenji Wu released his thirteenth album, the soupy Fall in Galaxy, Xiao Yu released his fifth, the often anxious Nothing to See, and Nine Chen released his seventh, Ten Thousand Times. Kenji Wu and Xiao Yu both offer more electronic elements to their pop-rock, the best in the cosmic waltz of Fall in Galaxy’s title track and the unease of Xiao Yu’s “Nothing to See” but perhaps the greatest indicator of a return to normalcy lies in Nine Chen’s return to his pop-rock ballads, especially considering the last few years have seen him attempt something new with the collaboration with newer artists for their own makeshift boyband.
I’ve started this month’s playlist with a selection of the best from the above albums. I think it’s a nice reminder of what remains popular in Taiwan, as it’s perhaps what is best defined as pop in Taiwan. One of the many reasons this newsletter exists is that there aren’t many great places to discover new “Chinese” music, so with that, I’m really happy that Jake Newby’s got a newsletter, Concrete Avalanche, out now about Chinese music—in this case music from China, not necessarily in Mandarin. He leans into the more experimental side and covers some of those acts that you just have to be there, inside China, to really understand. It’s great! Check out the latest issue and subscribe:
For this month’s issue, I’ve got Crispy’s fourth album, Take It Slow, I Will Be There, a dream-pop album about being in love and trying to be better, along with singles from Yo Lee, newly debuted boy group BOYHOOD, and Sammy Chang.
Albums
Crispy - Take It Slow, I Will Be There
“I saw you in my dream and called your name until I was hoarse, I heard nothing but an endless sigh,” Christine Ting sings over the plaintive piano line. If that felt too real then the rest comes in like a hazy mist: a damper on the piano line and warbling synths. Like all the other songs off the duo’s fourth studio album, “Easier Said” eventually drifts into dream-pop, like living outside their romantic bliss is something of a mistake. “I got a dog after you left,” Skippy Lu sings in its haze, perhaps pathetically hoping you’ll hear, “I don’t smoke anymore.”
Take It Slow, I Will Be There fully immerses itself in dream pop only after things have taken a painful turn. “Heading North” sees things turn colder while “Old House” cleans house to prepare for change. But prior to that, Crispy take an idealized view of love: “if forgiveness is the last redemption, then love is the hard work we must go through” or a track later and it’s “to love is to say ‘sorry’ one hundred times, to grow is to hear ‘no problem’ one thousand times.” They set on making romantic platitudes but love is better conveyed in what’s not always loudly pronounced between the pair. How “I will be there watching you grow” turns into “you will be there watching me grow” as an act of mutual adoration on the opener. Or how “Chase! Chase! Chase!” finds Ting in this state of anxiety that’s immediately quelled each time Skippy Lu joins in harmony.
“I Will Be There” can be best understood through the progression of its dynamics. It builds into lively indie-rock territory then immediately goes quiet with just the pair’s harmony: “I will be there, watching you go” sounds both comforting and scary, a familiar set of eyes but a growing distance. There’s a thought the duo pushes back quickly after they open shyly in unison. “You love the stars, love you him but you don’t love yourself.” Taken that way, the change in perspective after the instrumental fades feels like a dependent coping mechanism.
The dream pop is the salve but it can only soothe so much anxiety and mask so much distance. Outside of the dreamy bridge of “Chase! Chase! Chase!,” Ting’s anxieties manifest in nervous whispers and skittish twittering, the feeling of sinking as she can’t quite keep up with a partner. “Chase! chase! chase!” quickly turns into the similar-sounding “fall! fall! fall!” And on “Sorry X 100,” despite how their voices entwine around one another on the chorus, the distance grows as each maintains some sense of individuality—you can feel the wince as Ting counts each apology or how strong Lu comes across in his fond drawl on “because I love you.”
Loving each other was never the problem. Even on “Heading North” as the distance grows, the pair prioritize one another before themselves: “no matter what shape your soul takes, you are still you,” they offer kindly before leaving an escape “fall in love only when it’s time to fall in love.” But the back half sees them grow to become better to themselves, to offer themselves the care they neglected at the start. The second title track, its closer, “Take It Slow,” in collaboration with The Dinosaur’s Skin—the gimmicky “Jurassic-Pop” duo that don plastic dinosaur heads and sing about longing to be accepted—offers a chance to start again. The Dinosaur’s Skin extend the offer to be better to each other: “let’s grow old like you said before, this time I won’t let you go.” Even by the end, Crispy continue to believe that you should love as wholeheartedly as they did on “I Will Be There” and as intensely as they shouted that love was the hard work they must go through. Yet “take it slow” feels like a message to be held onto for themselves, to become better day by day, to slowly grow to love yourself.
Find it on streaming here: Apple Music // Spotify
Singles: “Take It Slow” // “I Will Be There” // “Sorry X 100”
Singles
Yo Lee - “Quitting You (feat. Mandark)”
Yo Lee’s music has always been dreamy, his gentle vocals over a delicately arranged lull, but here, perhaps thanks largely to Mandark from Sweet John and I Mean Us, “Quitting You” dives fully into dream-pop. It’s a dream-pop arrangement in a similar way to Crispy’s “I Will Be There,” not soaking itself in one mood completely but twisting and turning—where “I Will Be There” loaded all its feeling and efforts to drive itself into indie-rock territory, “Quitting You” does its best to detach itself from the dream. Lee pours everything in his soft-spoken arsenal to break off a toxic love. Gentle yet firm in his conviction, he opens: “don’t tell me about your recent life, don’t sell me your loneliness.” But “Quitting You” shifts when Lee gives the ghost of a lover something back: “I love you too much, I’ve gone numb.” “I’ll quit you completely,” he sighs, as the arpeggiating synths morph into delicately plucked guitar strings, “day by day, less and less of you.” The second time it’s sharper, like a friend conditioned to stop you from calling your ex. Lee is kinder to himself in letting it be gradual, wise enough to understand that all-or-nothing is impossible but determined enough to turn himself away from the abyss of nostalgia. More and more, Mandark’s background vocals recede into the background, until it’s just Lee, the dream-pop song fading into nothing as he reminds himself to stop looking back.
see also: Wu Qingfeng - “The Egg of Columbus (feat. Robin Guthrie)”
Sammy Chang - “討厭粉紅”
When it opens, “討厭粉紅” (“Hate Pink”) resembles the sort of thing Kimberley was doing on Sharp Music before she took control of her career. Hell, it’s not hard to imagine the commentary that Sammy Chang disaffectedly mutters (“you want me to pout and wink”) as the same comments a budding pop star would have to smile and shrug off in their career. “討厭粉紅” accepts it initially, disdainfully if it has to, before fumbling into a state of controlled rage, the blossom of pop-punk crunch slowly coming through its guitar line and clopping beat. Past the tempered guitar solo, Sammy Chang flips it onto her own terms and while her blend of dance-pop and pop-punk moderates both, she regains a bit of control: “I won’t pout and wink, don’t even think about controlling my lifeline,” she sings, “no matter how dangerous, I don’t care what they say cause I don’t give a…” laughing the disdain off. Though it sticks within its acceptable limits, so much so that the censoring feels like withholding, Chang’s honesty feels like a satisfying party.
BOYHOOD - “Landing”
Earlier this year, Yuehua Entertainment (the label behind EVERGLOW, the three Chinese members of WJSN, and not-disbanded-but-also-not-actively-together boy group NEXT) debuted girl group NAME, with the confident “Say My Name.” It kind of fails in the obvious compositional aspect: there’s ten seconds from 2:53 to 3:03 of the song that are exciting and then it just returns to its tepid melody and sedated tempo. But then there’s the language part, the reason Chinese idol groups so rarely deliver, too often bent on twisting a melody written by a non-fluent speaker and affixing a very strict pronunciation of the tonal language. The second issue is most obvious in the tightly wound rap section of “Say My Name” but its also difficult to sink into its choppy up-and-down melodies.
BOYHOOD’s debut single “Landing”—composed by a team of South Korean songwriters including R&B artist Xydo—is an introduction that follows more closely to Yuehua Entertainment’s other newly debuted boy group, the K-pop group TEMPEST.
Both TEMPEST’s “Bad News” and “Landing” come across as brazenly confident, though “Landing” comes off a bit less playfully and a bit less cheeky. BOYHOOD are less rigid on pronunciation—you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who could decipher the rap verse off the second verse but you also can’t tell me that the lyric is “like I’m stunned” and not “like I’m stoned.” That fluidity allows for greater attention to the actual melody, one that moves lazily but buoyantly, jumping up to a charming falsetto in the first verse and hitting a pre-chorus that actually feels rewarding in its chorus. BOYHOOD also stand on more solid ground than NAME did, its bassline satisfying enough to draw away from the posturing of the chorus. BOYHOOD don’t debut to a red carpet the way NAME did but instead arrive for a high school house party and “Landing” is loud, flashy, and giddily thrilling.
see also: “心动月光” // BOY STORY - “WW” // ENONE - “炙”
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.