Re-interpreting Kit Chan
Kit Chan
It is her first album since 2004’s East Toward Saturn and home-grown songbird Kit Chan has chosen to return to the music scene with an album of covers, including Leslie Cheung’s Chase, Eason Chan’s Brother And Sister and Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters.
Thankfully, though, she has no interest in churning out a compilation of karaoke hits.
The album title indicates where she is headed. For the most part, we are given stripped-down versions of the songs, often simply backed by piano or guitar. This gives them the chance to breathe and makes you really pay attention to what the song is about.
Moreover, Chan’s decision to do close miking means that every little detail in the vocal performance is picked up. She does not care for Auto-Tuned perfection but instead seeks out the emotional core of each song, even freely admitting that minor mistakes were left intact. While her commercial Mandopop albums often had her belting it out and shooting for the high notes on hits such as Worry and Dazzling, one of the rules for this album was: no unnecessary showboating.
Instead, she explores her rich lower register to great effect in Mavis Hee’s Regret, even aiming for a pitch a semitone lower than the latter’s.
She is clearly relishing the freedom that comes with releasing a record on her own label, Banshee Empire.
It is also interesting to compare what she sounds like in different languages.
Somehow, the nasal quality in her voice is more pronounced and she sounds more laidback, almost lazy, in her enunciation when she sings in Cantonese. Sometimes, it is beguiling, and at other times, I find myself wishing for the cleaner vocal lines she displays in Mandarin and English songs.
While she steers clear of current hits, it would have been nice if she could have been even more adventurous in her choice of songs and played around even more with the arrangements.
Still, this is a welcome return of a vocalist at the top of her game. Her next move should be interesting.
(ST)