I Love You, John

Sandee Chan

Taiwan’s Sandee Chan has tackled weighty topics before. The song Too Late examined death, while her last album’s title track, If There Is One Thing That Is Important, wrestled with the question of what fans are looking for. For her existential pains, she walked away with the Golden Melody Award for Best Mandarin Female Singer in 2009.

This time around, the singer-songwriter-producer-arranger lightens up and serves up electronic pop. Her declaration of intent can be found on the track Youth: “Music, let’s play”.

Hence, the title track chugs along on synthesizer riffs as Chan purrs playfully: “What’s up John/John’s very strange/Is it really John/John it is/Or don’t you want John/Oh it’s probably John.”

It is pop with a wink and a nudge from someone who once declared I Have Never Been A Humorous Girl.

She free-associates on Lullaby: “Baby pink, Baby blue, Baby grand, playing your lullaby.” She juxtaposes gym workouts and relationships on Calisthenics For Two with its refrain of “I love you, two of us exercising four limbs”.

Another theme running through the album is music itself.

Chan asks on Beautiful Life: “How do you sing the chorus of a beautiful life so that it sounds moving and thoughtful?” While on Youth, she pleads: “Music, please please quickly save me, please please teach me to rock, please please give me soul”.

Happily, her own albums are part of the answer.

Sticky

Cyndi Wang

Has Taiwan’s Cyndi Wang gotten less annoying or have I just grown accustomed to her voice?

The album might be Sticky but the cutie-pie is at her least cloying here.

The singer-actress wrote Stick To You, a slice of light-hearted pop about a nascent relationship which ends on an unexpectedly snarky note.

She also dishes out helpings of bouncy dance pop, with the retrolicious Rock Girl being the most fun.

Wang does a passable job with the radio-friendly ballads such as Don’t Cry and Love Is Empty. But it stops short of being deeply felt, even when she sings on the latter: “When dreams and reality collide/I realise love has become empty/As if a blackhole/Has swallowed love whole.” Not that it will matter to those who simply want to drown in her liquid Bambi eyes.

Sense Of Security

Red Flower

The debut album from Red Flower mixes a pop-rock sensibility with musings mostly about love.

Apart from engaging, energetic numbers such as A Sense Of Security, Love Second Time Round and High High High, the material sometimes suffers from a lack of distinctiveness.

If this Taiwanese band are to bloom, they will need more songs such as Moonlight, which sounds sinuous and at once retro and modern – and unlike anything else on the disc.

(ST)