The 2nd Home

Kay Tse

Long album gestation periods seem to be in vogue these days.

The 2nd Home, Hong Kong singer Kay Tse’s first full-length Mandarin album, has arrived five years after her last effort, Kay One (2005).

This is positively speedy, compared to fellow singer Denise Ho, who took nine years to release her maiden Mandarin album.

Like Ho’s recent Unnamed.Poem, Tse’s release is a considered affair, with top singer-songwriters such as Khalil Fong and LaLa Hsu contributing compositions.

The tender warmth of her voice comes across well in Mandarin, though Home seems to be a tad less adventurous compared to her last Cantonese record Slowness (2009).

On ballads such as Fong’s Frailty, Tse draws you in emotionally with lyrics such as: “What are we living for, what is love worth/So many fake moves, we are all lonely”.

Farewell, by sodagreen’s Wu Ching- feng, is another stand-out.

Wedged between the rock-flavoured I Think and the closer Ten Years, the track Orchid Fingers, which features Beijing opera artist Li Yugang, sits a little uneasily in the line-up.

But it is an overall noteworthy effort. The album title is heartening: Tse is staying in - not merely straying onto – Mandopop territory.

Wild Rose 2009 LIVE CONCERT (2CDs/DVD)

Penny Tai

To mark her decade-long stint in the music business, Malaysian singer-songwriter Penny Tai held a concert at the Taipei International Convention Centre in November last year.

Naturally, her best-known hits are all here, on this live recording, including Blessing On The Street Corner, How, The Love You Want and Crazy Love, for which she won the Golden Melody Award for Best Composer in 2006.

The accompanying DVD completes the audio-visual experience.

You get to see, for example, Tai using her body as a human drum for the concert’s opening number Blowing Beep.

She has written some lovely ballads over the years, but it seems like she has been overshadowed by the popularity of her songs. Listening to and watching her on stage, one starts to wonder “What now?” of Tai’s career.

Bii Story

Bii

If Bii did not exist, some marketing exec would have dreamed him up.

The singer-songwriter’s father is Taiwanese and his mother is Korean. Such a bicultural background allows him to perfectly straddle Mandopop and K-pop.

Accordingly, there are Mandarin and Korean versions of key tracks, such as After Turning Around and Bye Bye Bye, crooned in Bii’s smooth, clean voice. To ensure maximum exposure for this newcomer, several of the songs have been pegged to a Taiwanese idol drama.

This, together with the collection of postcards featuring Bii, packaged with the CD, suggests a plausible trajectory of TV series roles and theme songs, enroute to popularity and adulation.

But, perhaps, we are getting ahead of ourselves in this story.

(ST)