#43: Ode to Wither
on the stunning new album by Wang Yiling about starts and endings and the occasionally bright, often-monotonous parts between
I was in a hot pot place on the weekend and they kept playing ‘00s Mandopop, like that was the only Mandopop that existed: Jay Chou, Jolin Tsai, etc. etc. It’s strange how Chinese people are often stuck in this same epoch as if that’s the only Chinese music that ever existed. Like here you are, stuck in time, listening to the same lovesick ballad over and over, crying into a bowl of slightly undercooked meat seasoned with a sauce that’s so spicy it’ll hurt your stomach the next day. And yet, somehow, it’s still satisfying.
For this month, I wrote about Wang Yiling’s debut album, which is rough and beautiful. Singles also from Leah Dou, FEnIX, and anti-talent. Hopefully more to come soon.
Wang Yiling - Ode to Wither
“Do you lose all your defenses / when someone tells you the end of the story?” asks Wang Yiling midway through the opener of her debut album. The build-up to that question is heavy and somewhat unexpected: one minute, Wang’s calling you pet names in a gentle hush and sprawled across your body, the next, she’s probing with deep intensity. She’s singing about breaking and burning, insomnia that lasts an eternity, and oblivion as a form of death—endings that come with a harsh air of finality. Ode to Wither is confrontational like that, something the singer-songwriter wants to make instantly clear.
Love songs on Ode to Wither are far and few—her question in this moment of intimacy on “我们终结了过去, 现在, 未来” (“We’ve Closed Our Past, Present, and Future”) is like a premonition for its end. Closest is “呼唤爱人” (“Calling Out to My Lover”), a song so achingly desperate that it sounds more like an act of worship: “lover,” she calls over and over again, “be my very last lover.” Yet immediately following is “献身” (“Devotion”), a track that alludes to another goodbye. Where “呼唤爱人” is performed in plainspoken language, here, Wang is more abstract and literary—most affecting is the way she appends a word to the end of “cry” to transform it into “sob,” while her voice rises into a devastating wail.
Wang initially wrote these songs between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two with just an acoustic guitar. Her lyrics are marked with the confusion of someone facing the difficult transition to young adulthood, the tricky sensation when everything feels intense but remains most challenging to express. Yet Ode to Wither sounds considerable and immense, fleshed out by an international team of instrumentalists that provide much of the heft that makes the album so affecting. Her howled sob might be powerful, but it’s the screech and wail of the clarinet that fully conveys her anguish. It abruptly quiets before Wang arrives, singing in a almost choral fashion: “my heart is just a heart,” she sings, the dynamic change feels as if she’s hit with a sudden moment of clarity. In this light, the final farewell seems natural.
Equally as surprising is the way a song can land in unexpected territory. On “呼唤爱人,” she dives into something resembling eastern European folk music, making it sound even more ritualistic. The instrumentation adds barbs and ridges to Wang’s folk songs and nowhere is that clearer than “士兵” (“Soldier”). At one point, the song is almost jaunty, as if Wang is making her own version of a worker song, before the arrangement grows into something more intense, more like a prog-rock adaptation for a singer-songwriter. The strings shriek, the woodwinds caterwaul. And just as easily, it can turn calm, settling to just the finger-picked guitar and Wang’s hushed vocals.
Start and end are not simple ideas on Ode to Wither. On “士兵,” she waxes about how death can be a form of understanding, yet even as her idea of it remains complex, her depiction of killing is brutal and gory: bullets puncturing chests; soldiers and hope buried in foreign territory—these allusions to war and violent language are recurrent across the album. Yet there’s a beautiful illustration of the process as circular by the end of the track as she sings about a boy reborn in his new mother’s cradle. The inverse is also true. Things that typically signal starts can be equally as callous and on “我们终结了过去, 现在, 未来,” she sounds fearful of the light. “But Dawn, carrying her sickle / illuminates our basement / harvesting one after another,” she mewls over the cautious piano melody—it’s almost as if a stray beam of light could cause the end of a relationship.
Wang seems to view change as a necessary if violent force. The only other love song, the only other moment of peace on Ode to Wither where it doesn’t feel like time will crush you, is its penultimate track, “终曲2020” (“Finale 2020”). Here, she fishes up a memory of before either party had realized the relationship was ending: “if snow falls in June / warm my hands with love,” she calls. Buoyed by a harmonium, it may not exactly sound joyous, but it sounds comfortable. But then Ode to Wither shifts back to the present. The final track exchanges the children’s choir for an adult choir, Wang’s view melancholic again as she’s reminded of just how much of her life is suffering. In facing death, she rejects the past. The new fears are hard enough without having to carry old sorrows and abandoned desires.
Listen here: Spotify
anti-talent - “Here and Now”
Over the gentle strokes and dull glimmer of a soft rock beat, the trio can’t help but dwell on the past. Huang Ruoxin drags her words, as if every movement forward is itself a pain: “why am I never satisfied with the present me?” she questions in a quiet coo, “all I can do is keep moving backwards.” Previous songs saw the two rappers unwittingly sift through beats in clumsy fashion, but “Here and Now” counts on it. The sluggish start to Pei Tuo’s rap feels unpleasant, but when he kicks forward, when his flow starts to take shape, it’s a satisfying push. “Here and now is all we have / we should not look back,” ends Shou Mei. The phrase might not be elegant, but it’s still a solid reminder.
FEnIX - “YUM CHA 2000”
Member Max painstakingly went through the effort of making this a faithful nineties throwback by writing and then rewriting and having the group record and re-record a sample of lyrics in Cantonese. He probably didn’t need to—I’ll never not be suckered into boy groups doing cheesy little new jack swing numbers.
Leah Dou - “California Baby”
“California Baby” turns out to be the “Monday” of Leah Dou’s latest album, the big pop piece that shrugs off the anxieties and apprehension in the midst of her often murmured and cautious music. On in the air, she often circles back to this idea of being away from a lover: “I miss you, I miss you,” she hums on the title track, miles away from the object of her affection; on the waa wei-assisted “可憐的東西” (“Pitiful Things”), it’s about the frustration that often comes with distance, perhaps for good, perhaps just for now.
But “California Baby” rips through the idea of this being the norm. “So what,” she sings, and her voice has never sounded louder or brighter. The opening synths sound like her characteristic melancholy, with downtempo electronics that bubble at the surface, but the guitar line buzzes out of this hopelessness. Pretty soon, everything is wrestling to keep in step: the bass line goes for a savory funk groove, while the synths explore a new language, locking into brighter timbres and shimmering and whirling into more elastic shapes. Dou gets a bit flashy—belonging to a place she’s only a visitor in no longer seems like a deal-breaker. She curls her words into a sarcastic little spoken harmony and hurls them into space. The gleefully shouted title is as if she’s discovering that this could be an occasional paradise.
Extra Listening
CoCo Lee’s sisters put together a tribute album, Always On My Mind, that also doubles as a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of her debut—it’s more focused on her voice—a reminder of how powerful an instrument it could be—rather than her music, so expect more ballads and jazzy numbers, but with the sentimentality of a couple of tracks where she sings with her sisters.
J-Fever, Eddie Beatz, and Zhou Shijue have their third collaborative album, 你的声音变了 (Your Sound Changed), out now.
A couple years ago, FloruitShow released one of my favourite albums of the decade—it also feels like some of the most Chinese music you can make nowadays: sickly sentimental chamber pop buoyed by harp and treated with a bunch of vocoder gloss and random EDM drops. Well the triplet sisters have effectively disbanded after one sister was charged and imprisoned for drug trafficking and are now a duo of triplet sisters, DOUDOU (I’m guessing DUDU wasn’t considered an option). They’ve got a new live album out, but without Du Xue’er’s harp performances, it feels much less affecting.
Producer George Chen recently posted about having started work on albums by waa wei, Hebe Tien, Eve Ai, and Hung Pei Yu. Would be concerning only if his work with each sounded the exact same, but each performer’s identity comes out stronger than his cinematic leanings. It’s going to be a good year for me.
All these girl groups keep trying, hoping they’ll have the same success as their Korean counterparts, sometimes without really understanding the difference in climate between Taiwan/China and South Korea. Added on to the list of official debuts from NEXT GIRLZ groups are babyMINT with “BOOOOOORING” and ELL&s (described as a subunit of Sunny Parfum) with “Elevatuh.” There’s also GENBLUE, who are making the clearest bet, officially debuting in South Korea in lieu of Taiwan with their single “COCOCO.” Perhaps the funniest is in China: Yuehua Entertainment’s NAME had previously debuted with seven members, then the agency decided it’d be nice to throw them in a survival show where two members were ousted and one member voluntarily left to form their four-member girl group, which is still called NAME—hope the decision works out for them! This new track is not promising though.
The boy version of NEXT GIRLZ, the sequel to ATOM BOYZ, ATOM BOYZ II has started.
Find the latest Canto Wrap and Mando Gap playlists on Spotify and me on Twitter here.
Just finished listening to the new 王忆灵 album. It's a gem of a collection of songs. Pretty impressive for a debut record.