Songs for nature lovers is one quick way to describe Green Flower (紅布綠花朵) by Chinese musicians Xiaojuan and Residents of The Valley (小娟 & 山谷裡的居民). This recent Wind Music release will probably hold its greatest appeal among tea-drinking, nature-loving urbanites with its gentle acoustic folk sounds and ambient atmosphere.
The music plays it safe through and through with cleanly strummed and picked acoustic guitars, flutes, bells and hand drums. Then there’s the pristine voice of singer and guitarist Xiaojuan, who impressively glides through the high range in songs like Three Birds (三隻小鳥). It’s easy to imagine the Hebei Province native’s yodels echoing through picture-perfect mountain scenery.
And that’s what much of this album is — reverent, romantic portraits of nature. In Valley Life (山谷裡的居民), full of guitar lines that evoke babbling brooks, Xiaojuan sings of how residents in a mountain valley will never leave their home, for how could they? “Forever blue the sky is in the valley.”
Xiaojuan’s confident voice keeps the album going, even if the pastoral theme grows tiresome. Her haunting, whispery timbre in Evening Red (晚霞) adds emotional weight to the sparse lyrics, while her crystal-clear diction and phrasing in the Celtic-tinged Heartful World (心的世界) is attention grabbing.
Guitarist Li Qiang (黎強) and percussionist and flutist Liu Xiaoguang (劉曉光) both deserve mention for solid performances that play off the strengths of the music and Xiaojuan’s voice.
The group will be in Taiwan next month to appear at a concert commemorating the 9/21 Earthquake. For details, visit Wind Music’s Web site at www.windmusic.com.tw.
— DAVID CHEN
Few can rival Tsai Chin (蔡琴) for sheer staying power, and whether you like her style of music or not, she has proved herself a consummate performer over nearly three decades, releasing innumerable songs that have become classics of the Mando-pop repertoire. Vast quantities of her work are now available in cheap multi-disk collections. This should not put anyone off Love Is Like a Song (愛像一首歌), Tsai’s most recent release, which includes a mix of updated covers of classic songs from the campus song movement, and a number of originals.
Tsai has always been willing to experiment with even the best loved songs, often giving them a Western feel that this reviewer has often found off-putting. In Love Is Like a Song, the most notable example of this is her treatment of the Taiwanese favorite My Grandma’s Penghu Bay (外婆的澎湖灣) made famous by Pan An-pang (潘安邦). It has lost its lilting campus song cadences and acquired a honky-tonk piano sound that in this instance proves surprisingly effective, giving the song a propulsive energy totally lacking in the folksy original.
In taking on the classic Farewell Again, Cambridge (再別康橋), the lyrics composed by poet Xu Zhimo (徐志摩), Tsai opts for a cinematic treatment with a rich, layered orchestral feel. Her voice glides above the orchestra, dominating the lyrics, familiar to almost every lover of Mandarin music, and imposing her own sense of purpose. The song, a meditation on memory and on death, acquires in her hands a passionate strength that distinguishes it from the fatalistic lament that characterizes its usual rendition.
While Tsai has put a new gloss on the old songs, her original tracks seem to hark back to an earlier age. The title track, while lyrically appealing, seems all too reminiscent of the lounge ballads of the 1970s, with its backing singers, electric guitar and organ. Other tracks, such as By Chance (偶然), with its vaguely Iberian flavor, is perfectly delightful, if rather self-consciously exotic. In all cases, Tsai is unafraid and utterly self-assured. Her strength, of character and voice are what emerge most clearly in this album. More than anything else, Love Is Like a Song shows that age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.
— IAN BARTHOLOMEW
Shaman (玄武), aka Elliot Tsai (蔡一暐), is an American-born, half-Taiwanese rapper with a penchant for self-fashioned modern mysticism and party music. Earlier this year, the 31-year-old took a break from his group, THC (Taipei Hip-hop Crew, H中P在台北) and came up with Shamanizm, a collection of smooth and driven hip-hop tracks.
In a Taipei Times interview, he cited influences like Tupac, Method Man, Eminem, Snoop, UGK, and 50 Cent, which inform his keen musical phrasing and vocal bravado. But his lyrics don’t dwell in gangsta mythology — he sets out to stitch together his own.
The album kicks off with a couple of short clips announcing the Shaman’s arrival. Force gets things rolling with sharp old school beats, which bring to mind Afrika Bambaataa, and a personal statement: “I’m just a modern day sage ready to wage war/on the illusions of the Matrix/cuz that’s what I came for.”
In songs like Tha Freedom, Shaman sounds at ease rapping in both Mandarin and English. His delivery is always musical, while the lyrics still carry their weight in either language after repeated plays.
Shamanizm references psychedelia, comic books and science fiction (he name-drops the X-Men and the Matrix). Druid Fluid samples Spock and Uhura from a 1960s Star Trek episode. A hallucigenic-inspired revelation reminds Shaman of his mission: “In the full moon I saw a rabbit/he gave me a bite of some mystical cabbage/he told me to go speak to the masses and undo some of the devil’s damage.”
In some places, the post-production is uneven. Shaman uses a live band to create a groovy, organic sound on a few tracks, but their final mix doesn’t quite flow with the rest of the album. However the music crew deserves praise for original beats and creative sampling. One B-side track, Bumpkin, makes great use of the blues traditional You Got to Move.
There are rousing party songs like Mystic and Wolvez Eat Meat, but it’s hard not to go back to tracks like Who Am Eye. Here he gets existential: “Who am eye/well my name is Elliot, but my name is meaningless/once my body turns to dust … name of the nameless/ego without confidence, only humble cognizance.”
— DAVID CHEN
Hsi Pan Jie (錫盤街) is a post-rock band formed by guitarist Huang Wan-ting (黃晼婷) of the beloved and now-defunct girl punk group Ladybug. Its second album, Needing Dimensions is a refreshing and original take on a genre that often gets pigeonholed as wandering, shoegazer music.
Listeners won’t be just staring at the ground here. The album has a lively, buoyant feel, even with the requisite droning rhythms and outer space guitar effects. The opening track, New Magicians, runs on an exuberant, power chord-driven melodic figure. A sense of wonder and excitement grows as Huang’s guitar lines grow more and more lyrical. The key change towards the end prevents listeners from drifting away and sets up nicely for a satisfying crash finish. The fade-out decay of the buzzing guitar would make Neil Young smile.
The title track builds suspense with some spacey noodling from the band, and then explodes into an unforgettable, wonderfully dense storm of distortion — a testament to the skills of both Huang and the recording engineer who manages to keep the overall mix warm and transparent.
The punk in Huang takes over in tracks like Trendy Psychiatrist, which has vocals that sound intentionally rendered to be unclear, and the hyperactive 195, in which the band flaunts both its speed and agility.
Like many post-rock groups, which mostly perform instrumentals, Hsi Pan Jie sets out to create evocative moods that drive the music. But what sets this band apart is how well it balances musical whims with snappy song structures and arrangements — something clearly evident on Needing Dimensions.
While Taiwanese fans pine over renowned bands of the genre like Mogwai or Mono, hopefully they won’t forget that compelling music is being made in their own backyard.
— DAVID CHEN
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