Diva

Wakin Chau

Taiwan’s Wakin Chau gets in touch with his feminine side – complete with make-up and hairpiece. Yes, that’s him on the cover as a Chinese opera female impersonator.

The makeover makes sense since Chau is covering songs by women singers here. He does not change the gender in the material, so on Winnie Hsin’s Understanding, he sings: “I thought I would seek revenge/But I didn’t/When I saw the man I once loved deeply as helpless as a baby.”

There is a sensitivity to his reading that just about makes it work. He comes off even better when one compares this to Eric Moo’s nuance-free belting on The Classic (2009), in which he also covered songs by female artists. Some of the more recent numbers, including Sandy Lam’s At Least There Is Still You and A-mei’s Hostage, are still too fresh in the mind to be reinterpreted.

The remake of Anita Mui’s Women Are Like Flowers is anything but safe, though, as it features Peking opera artist Hu Wenge. While the late Mui’s singular version sounded like a lament, Chau’s version, intriguingly enough, sounds more like a paean to women. Guess you could say this record is one instance where diva behaviour is acceptable.

Soul_Mate

Rachel Liang

On her third album, Taiwan’s Rachel Liang ventures beyond singing about love and muses about friendship as well. The title track is in fact how one shades into the other, though the lyrics pretty much spell things out: “I love you very much, I’m really sure, you’re like a lover, and a soul mate.”

The runner-up in the second season of singing competition One Million Star sounds shrill on the ballads and fares better on the faster-paced tracks. The perky Happy Holiday is about leaving a love triangle behind while the Adia-penned Can’t Take It captures the dizzy joy of falling in love.

After all the ups and downs of friendships and relationships, the album ends with Still Friends, an upbeat number about moving on, which accepts that love, sometimes, is simply not meant to be.

(ST)