My Love
Hebe Tien
Looking For
Jeanie Zhang
Bad Girl
Amber Ann
Taiwanese singer – and one-third of girl group S.H.E – Hebe Tien (far right) delivers the goods again on My Love, her
follow-up to last year’s well-received solo debut To Hebe. Left to her own devices, she comes across as a chic hippie chick, all grown up and with a mind of her own.
Collaborators such as indie singer- songwriters Sandee Chan, Cheer Chen and sodagreen’s Wu Ching-feng burnish Tien’s music cred on the tracks Utopia, Shadow’s Shadow and You.
On the song Flower, Tien explores
unusual line readings that make the breezy track more memorable, as she
sings: “Flowers, learning coloratura/
Flowers, borrowing fragrance/Flowers, flowers are so beautiful/Does the heart want to feel the same.”
Hearteningly, her vocals seem to have improved from her previous effort and the sound is more nuanced and full-
bodied here, hopefully not the result of electronic fiddling. With her hard- earned music credibility of late, one foresees that her membership in the popular S.H.E – put
together by the dictates of a record company and struggling to shake their reputation as disposable popsters – could become a liability to her down the line.
Faring a little less well on her second release is China’s singer-composer Jeanie Zhang. There is no doubt she has a clear voice, but the material this time does not leave as strong an impression as the songs from her 2009 debut, Keep Going.
She writes in the liner notes about “strangely” losing her voice last year and the frustrations and fears she faced. But there is no trace of this struggle to be found here.
Instead, too many songs are in the mid-tempo range and deal with the well-worn topic of love in a not particularly fresh manner. Or, maybe, it is the fact that familiarity breeds higher expectations.
This is not a problem faced by Taiwan’s sexiest woman Amber Ann, who was voted No. 1 in FHM magazine Taiwan’s 2011 poll of top 100 sexiest women. The model and TV host is merely releasing a pictorial book of her in sexy underwear with various degrees of translucency. Wait a second, there is actually a debut CD of songs tacked on here.
If you can get past the baby-doll voice, you are rewarded with cutesy numbers. Hola, for instance, seems to be an attempt to pun the Spanish greeting with the Minnan phrase for okay.
On the final track Where Did She Go, she sings: “I know I’m not noble, but I’m definitely not lowly.” That spunky attitude and note of defiance would probably be more convincing without the lingerie catalogue.
(ST)