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 Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s