Power Station 動力火車
Red 就是紅
Him International 華研國際
It's been almost two years since A-Bon (
The new CD offers something for everyone and certainly puts on a better showing than the national baseball team, for which Power Station's Hit the Sky (
While the older material remains entertaining, it is the newer material that really stands out. With more stress on orchestration, techno loops and grinding guitar reverb, Power Station appears to have opened a new chapter in its celebrated career. Dance-oriented material like Overjoyed (
The more mainstream blues/rock numbers like Happy to Separate (
Will 潘瑋柏
WuHa
Universal
The long-time star of GTV's (
Not that this poor showing dented his career. Along with Jay Chou (
He might not be as big a draw as "Mumbles" Chou (so-called because you can't hear what Jay's singing about), but Will's lyrics can be understood whether he's crooning in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all his tunes make for a pleasant listen.
There are three distinct flavors to the 10 tunes on WuHa. There's heavy hip hop-orientated tunes, like the title track, WuHa, I Don't Understand Cantonese (我識廣東話) and Diversion (聲東擊西), and there's more mainstream pop hip hop tunes like Happy Worshipping (快樂崇拜) and the album's highlight, the bouncy and feel-good number, Say You Can do It (說到做到). And, just for good measure and no doubt to appease his teenage female fans, Will has thrown in a couple of so-so love songs that don't dent what is on the whole a good mainstream Mando pop/rap album.
Monkey Insane 潑猴
Our Generation 我們的世代
Avex Trax
Winners of last year's MTV Band Hunting competition and the Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival, Monkey Insane (
Our Generation (
The album takes no prisoners from the word go and Monkey Insane goes straight for the jugular with a sterling nasty piece of hardcore hybrid hip hop/nu-metal titled Come On, on which the band's two guitars collide in a nauseating feeding frenzy.
What follows are a dozen tunes that pack an equal punch and prove that at least one studio engineer in Taiwan knows where the "oomph" button is on the mixing desk. Along with the fantastic opener, other tunes worthy of mention include the grinding Mendacious (
Various
China Very Coll 很牛逼
Scream
While several of Avex Trax's recent string of releases featuring Chinese bands have given Taiwanese listeners the chance to hear plenty of new and interesting material, if the bands on China Very Cool (
Hanging in a Box's (
China Very Cool is not cool. Post-rock act Thin Man (
The album's only saving grace, and it's a small one, comes from the mohawked ska/punk combo Hey! (
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would