Top 3 sodagreen albums

LITTLE UNIVERSE (2006)
The moment the bagpipes herald the opening track You Are, You Will signalled that this was the album on which sodagreen’s music world burst wide open. From the seething discontent on Little Universe to the innocence and purity of Little Love Song, the band plumb the different aspects of life with aplomb.
The album racked up seven nominations at the Golden Melody Awards and won two – for Best Band and Best Melody for Wu Ching-feng for Little Love Song.
Unfortunately, sodagreen rarely perform Little Love Song live anymore. They have performed it so many times that at one point, Wu asked those who requested it: “Aren’t you tired of it?”
The answer, of course, is no.

DAYLIGHT OF SPRING (2009)
In a nutshell, this is one of the best Mandopop albums – ever.
It is a gorgeous record which manages to capture the ephemeral beauty of spring and the hope it brings even as it embraces the shadows that light always casts. It reached No. 2 on Taiwan’s G-Music album chart.
Before The Snow Melts is oh-so-tender as it welcomes oncoming spring like a lover while there is joy and celebration in Daylight. For the delicate Stopping At Each Station, Wu flits between the higher and lower registers like the butterfly of the song. And Symphonic Dream casts a spell as it navigates between sleep and wakefulness, thirst and rain as well as waiting and arrival.
There were Golden Melody Award nominations for Best Band and Best Album Production. The song Daylight was also nominated for Best Arranger and won for Best Music Video.
Each track works on its own and all the tracks magically coalesce into a whole greater than the sum of their parts.

WHAT IS TROUBLING YOU (2011)
Even when they are at less than full strength, sodagreen continue to fire on all cylinders.
Because of guitarist A-fu’s national service stint, the band had to release an album without him. He is also absent from the album cover.
This is no mere filler album, though – one aural treat follows another. From the contemplative The Limits Of Happiness to the sweet duet with S.H.E’s Ella Chen, I Wrote Of You In My Song, from the moving ballad Enjoy Loneliness to the gospel-tinged title track, this is the sound of a band in confident form.
It topped the G-Music album chart and sodagreen notched up another nomination for Best Band at the Golden Melody Awards.
(ST)

Re:Workz
Sandy Lam
For those who love Hong Kong singer Sandy Lam’s voice, Re:Workz is a treat you will not want to miss.
It is also her first mostly Cantonese album since 2005’s S/L.
While the material is familiar, it is not merely a slapdash effort at warming over cold dishes.
It is clear that a lot of care and thought has gone into remaking her past works. Her clear and heart-warming pipes are front and centre here with some choice instrumentation.
Opening track Naked Secret, from Sandy ’94 (1994), is a revelation. Stripped of its synth arrangements, the song gets a new lease of life and Lam has never sounded as tender as she does here.
But with the close-miking process, she ends up sounding a little too breathy on some tracks, such as Breaking Dawn, composed by Dick Lee.
The lone new number here is Avery Jane, a mid-tempo slice of lightly groovy pop about growing older and wiser.
She croons: “Can’t withstand being buffeted by wind and rain, who discovers/The light after the clouds/Getting a little hurt will toughen you up.”
The accompanying DVD comes with black-and-white music videos for Avery Jane as well as Naked Secret, and also gives an insight into the work process.
Video clips show a nurturing and relaxed environment as Lam works with musicians such as her music producer boyfriend Jun Kung and blind pianist Jezrael Lucero.
The classy results speak for themselves.
(ST)

Beijing Love Story
Chen Sicheng
The story: Five interconnected stories about love unfold, mostly in modern-day Beijing. Chen Feng (Chen Sicheng) falls in love with Shen Yan (Tong Liya) the moment he sets eyes on her. Chen’s boss Wu Zheng (Wang Xuebing) is a philanderer with a long-suffering wife Zhang Lei (Yu Nan). She finds out and then meets up with Liu Hui (Tony Leung Ka Fai). Liu is later seen seemingly on a rendezvous with Jialing (Carina Lau) in Greece. Liu objects to his teenaged daughter Xingyang (Ouyang Nana) taking part in a talent show on television but Song Ge (Liu Haoran), who has a crush on her, has a plan to make that happen. Finally, Song’s grandfather Wang Daqi (Wang Qingxiang) is being set up on blind dates by Gao Lu (Siqin Gaowa). Wang seems to hit it off with Xie Aijia (Elaine Jin), who gets upset when she finds out who Gao really is.

One of these things is not like the others, goes the chant from the children’s programme Sesame Street. And in this case, the odd one out is the segment featuring Hong Kong-based stars Leung and Lau.
Given that it takes place on a Greek island, it does not even fit into the theme spelt out in the title. It also happens to be the weakest tale of the lot as Leung and Lau bicker and banter through a lacklustre game of truth-or-dare.
Apart from this glaring mis-step, the rest of the vignettes offer some interesting snapshots of the different stages of relationships in the metropolis that is Beijing today.
It is a decent effort from writer-director-actor Chen Sicheng, who had also written and directed the 2012 television series of the same name. The film is not a continuation of the series though and features a new story and characters.
Chen and Shen, played by real-life couple Chen Sicheng and Tong Liya, who met on the TV show of the same name, fall in love impetuously but the economic realities of getting married in the bustling city soon press in on them. Shen’s mother is disdainful of the fact that he lives in a cramped apartment and, meanwhile, Shen’s well-off ex makes her an indecent proposal.
The housing pressures faced by the young couple will probably strike a chord with viewers here as well.
The segment with Chen’s Lothario boss strikes a more cynical note. He makes this observation at one point: “Love is like a ghost, everyone’s heard of it but no one’s seen it.”
In contrast, the puppy love episode with Song and Xingyang is mostly sweet, with a sprinkling of poignant bitterness, as she will be leaving China soon to study abroad.
From young infatuation, the film jumps to love and companionship in one’s golden years.
Helmed by an award-winning trio of veterans – Wang Qingxiang, Siqin Gaowa and Elaine Jin – this is probably the strongest and most touching segment.
The actors find the notes of comedy, tenderness and tragedy in this senior citizen triangle and play them with grace.
(ST)

The Lunchbox
Ritesh Batra
The story: Ila (Nimrat Kaur) tries to get her husband’s attention by trying something new in the kitchen. But thanks to a mix-up in the lunchbox delivery system in Mumbai, her tiffin carrier of home-cooked goodness goes to Saajan Fernandez (Irrfan Khan), a loner office worker about to retire. Thus begins an exchange of handwritten notes between the two and an unlikely friendship develops.

The dabbawallas are part of a fascinating food delivery system in Indian cities in which freshly cooked meals make their way to thousands of office workers every day. It is a daunting task, given the numbers involved, the challenging state of Indian traffic and the fact that most of the dabbawallas, or carriers, are illiterate.
Drawing inspiration from this feat of logistical wonder, writer-director Ritesh Batra has come up with a moving tale about urban loneliness and human connection. The Hindi and English film is also a portrait of modern India, one that is not cloaked in over-the-top song and dance but is instead rooted in everyday life.
The opening scenes have a quasi-documentary feel to them as we follow the journey of one particular lunchbox from Ila’s kitchen to its final destination. When it makes its way back to her, completely empty, we share her joy, and disappointment when she realises a mistake was made in the delivery. The mistake though sets off a chain of events that will ultimately change her life.
Despite making his debut feature, Batra shows an assured grasp of story-telling as he deftly handles moments of drama, comedy and tragedy. And as the film’s distributor kindly cautioned, do not watch the film on an empty stomach or the food scenes will tip your hunger pangs over the edge.
Batra is also able to coax finely wrought characterisations from the actors. There is not a single false note in how the story develops and in the sensitive and naturalistic performances.
Award-winning Bollywood actor Khan (Life Of Pi, 2012) goes from being a curmudgeonly widower to a man who believes in life again, while film and stage actress Kaur (Peddlers, 2012) thoroughly slips under the skin of a regular wife and mother who begins to find her own voice.
The epistolary device may be old-fashioned but Batra and his co-writer Rutvik Oza have found a way to make it work in a modern-day setting. In an age of text messages and e-mail, the handwritten notes confer a conspiratorial intimacy between Ila and Saajan. The forms of address they use for each other further flesh out the characters, particularly as we get to hear the tone in the voiceovers. Saajan writes “Dear Ila”, exuding the easy confidence of an older man; Ila begins her notes with “Hello” without adding a name, a little distant as if aware of the possible impropriety.
Surrounding the two main roles is an indelible cast of supporting characters. There is the heard-but-not-seen Auntie upstairs who dishes out cooking and all other kinds of advice to Ila as well as Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), the new guy taking over Saajan’s job. Shaikh seems at first to be too slick for his own good but gradually, he bonds with Saajan over shared lunches and train journeys.
It is Shaikh who shares with Saajan a piece of homespun homily: Sometimes, the wrong train can get one to the right station.
As Saajan and Ila’s relationship deepens, the movie teases us: Do they meet up? What happens when they do? Will there be a happy ending?
Early on, Ila thanks Saajan for giving her something to hope for while waiting for the tiffin carrier’s return. And it is what the film’s ending does, holding out the possibility of hope for Saajan, and also for the audience, as a group of dabawallas chant away joyously.

Pluto
Kiat Goh
The debut album from local singer Kiat Goh takes the listener on an unusual journey. From Pluto to Belt Of Venus to North Star, the titles alone conjure up images of celestial bodies traversing the vastness of space.
It is a classy and cohesive record with music by Goh and lyrics by Johnson Ong, who has written for veteran artist Tracy Huang.
There is a lazy, jazzy vibe on the track Aurora as he sings: “Thinking of you in this coldest season/My heart is pounding/Can you come closer to me and warm my heart.”
The classically trained Goh has a richly warm voice which offers refuge in the inky darkness.
On the lead single Pluto, he croons over plaintive strings: “Hey, through the vicissitudes of the world/Happiness still lies by your side/Trapped in a cold world/Love is icebound and forever sealed away.”
A consistently compelling journey.
(ST)

The Wind Rises
Hayao Miyazaki
The story: Inspired by the Italian plane designer Giovanni Battista Caproni (Nomura Mansai), Jiro Horikoshi (Hideaki Anno) dreams of flight as a young boy. After studying engineering at university, he works for an airplane manufacturer and eventually succeeds in coming up with a fast aircraft, the Mitsubishi A5M. Both the A5M and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, were used by Japan during World War II. Along the way, Jiro falls in love with Naoko (Miori Takimoto), a girl he meets on a train journey disrupted by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Based on writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s manga adaptation of a 1937 short story of the same name by Tatsuo Hori.

Japan’s master of animation Hayao Miyazaki is the man behind some of my favourite flights of fancy.
From My Neighbour Totoro (1988) to Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) to Spirited Away (2001), he has created gorgeously rendered worlds in which tales of bravery and magic unfold.
The Wind Rises, however, does not soar to the same heights.
Perhaps to some extent, he was kept earthbound by the fact that this was a story based on the real-life character of Horikoshi, chief engineer of various World War II Japanese fighter designs.
In the first place, it was a controversial choice of subject matter given Japanese military aggression and the association of the Zero plane with kamikaze suicide missions during the war.
Miyazaki is careful not to glorify war and destruction.
Early on, Horikoshi’s mother says to him: “Fighting is never justified.” And his role model Caproni says more explicitly that “the dream of flight is cursed” – a thing of beauty can be an instrument of nightmare as well.
At the same time, there is the idea that all we can do is try to survive in tumultuous times.
“The wind is rising, we must try to live”, from French poet Paul Valery’s The Graveyard By The Sea, is a couplet that is repeated several times in the movie.
It is not fully persuasive though and the prickly question of Horikoshi’s culpability in the building of war machines is too readily resolved with a throwaway line: “We’re not arms merchants, we just want to build good aircraft.”
As a movie, The Wind Rises is, as always for a Studio Ghibli feature, beautifully illustrated. Miyazaki pays attention to the little details and that helps to bring the animated world vividly alive.
For example, in a scene of Horikoshi and Naoko rushing back to her home after the earthquake strikes, as they move against the flow of people fleeing, they catch the attention of a boy who glances at them curiously.
It could do with better pacing, though.
The film delved at length into the technicalities of plane design and the human element felt a bit short-changed.
Horikoshi and Naoko’s relationship is not that compelling as well, though there is a lovely wedding sequence between the two.
Hopefully, this will not be Miyazaki’s last film as announced. By one count, this is apparently his sixth retirement. There could well be wind still left in his sails.
(ST)

Mosaic Music Festival
Neko Case
Esplanade Concert Hall/Sunday

The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You (2013) was forged in a time of loss and despair. You would not know it though from Neko Case’s polite interactions with the audience.
The American singer- songwriter’s new album was written in the shadow of the deaths of her grandmother and her estranged parents and contains some of her most personal work to date.
But she did not refer to the difficult circumstances or rocky relationships directly, preferring to speak through her music instead.
One of the key moments in the concert was when she performed the hauntingly spare Nearly Midnight, Honolulu.
It was just her voice and some vocal accompaniment as she recounted an overheard outburst from mother to child: “Get the f*** away from me!/Why don’t you ever shut up?”
The connection seemed personal though when she sang: “They won’t believe you/When you say ‘My mother, she did not love me’.”
The lyrics are often enigmatic though and on the wonderfully atmospheric Night Still Comes, she croons repeatedly: “You never held it at the right angle.”
It is either an oblique admonishment or her advice to those who fail to take satisfactory selfies.
Regardless, there is a hint of huskiness at the edge of her voice that keeps the songs compelling. It was a versatile instrument that went from tenderly poignant on Calling Cards to ringing with accusation on Local Girl and the appreciative crowd took it all in.
The Grammy-nominated Case has often been tagged as alternative country and you can see why. Her music has some of that twangy melancholia of the country genre but it is more expansive and ambitious. Added to the mix of guitars and drums are the occasional banjo and tambourine and, memorably on Calling Cards, a trombone.
Meanwhile, backing vocalist Kelly Hogan provided some beautiful harmonies. She was also the one who engaged the audience the most, from encouraging people to just let go and yell “woo”, to sharing that Singapore’s heat was not friendly towards menopause.
Case and company also generated some heat of their own with Man. It came on with a swagger of guitars and attitude as she played about with gender identity, proclaiming “I’m a man” and provocatively declaring “you didn’t know what a man was/Until I showed you”.
The singer was one of the acts closing the Mosaic Music Festival on Sunday, bringing the 10-year well-loved event to an end, for now.
Until the next phase of Mosaic comes along, thank you for the music and for showing Singapore what a home-grown music festival can achieve.
(ST)

Alone The Way
Jia Jia
Her solo debut was Unforgettable (2013), and Taiwanese singer Jia Jia’s follow-up to that is very much so as well.
Her voice is a healing balm with which she tenderly comforts on lead single Sing For Lonely Souls: “I’m not the one you love/But I’m still willing to sing for your loneliness”.
You feel the ache on the ballad Unqualified, as strings swell and she acknowledges a painful truth: “I’m not qualified to let you ache for me/Keeping you by my side, yet not able to give you any happiness”.
The bluesy Unfree is a heartfelt and soulful cry for freedom, penned by Hao En.
The two had previously collaborated on the Golden Melody Award-winning Blue In Love (2006).
Jia Jia also has no problems tackling faster tempos.
Unanswerable swings lightly to a jazz groove, while Chocolate oozes sassiness and sultriness as she sings: “I want you, want you to fall into the trap/Quietly sidle close, grooving to the same frequency”.
She wants to sing for you along the whole way and not just when you are lonely.
(ST)

Labor Day
Jason Reitman
The story: An injured Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin) approaches 13-year-old Henry (Gattlin Griffith) for help at the mall. His divorced mother Adele (Kate Winslet) reluctantly agrees to take him back to their home and it is eventually revealed that Frank is an escaped prisoner on the run. He remains at their house over the course of the Labor Day holiday weekend in 1987 as the local police seek to track him down. Based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Joyce Maynard.

Call me cynical, but when you have an escaped prisoner in your home, that is not the time to be letting down your guard.
Not even when the runaway in question happens to be Frank Chambers, a man who is clearly gunning for Escaped Prisoner Of The Year, possibly of all time. He makes himself useful as the man about the house – cleaning out rain gutters, fixing the wheezy car and even bonds with Henry over baseball.
Instead of a sensuously tactile pottery-making scene (see Ghost, 1990), there is a tactile scene brimming with family wholesomeness as the three of them make pie together – even as there is a hint of a nascent attraction between Adele and Frank.
The movie is really a portrayal of Stockholm syndrome taken to a ludicrous extent. Not only do the hostages come to care for their captor, Adele actually falls for him. From trying to get him out of the house as soon as possible, she begins to suggest that he should stay on until his injury heals.
That the laughable premise is not completely unbelievable is due to the decent cast.
Brolin (True Grit, 2010) has to go from exuding a sense of menace to, essentially, playing a romantic lead.
The transition is still jarring, but it could have been worse. And it is no surprise that when his past is told through flashbacks, we learn that his biggest crime was being gullible – which would be our crime, too, if we bought into the idea touted here that all Adele needs is a real man, defined in the most cliched manner here.
Winslet’s portrayal of her role with an admirable touching vulnerability is wasted.
Coming from director Jason Reitman, who has helmed smarter and funnier works such as Thank You For Smoking (2005), Juno (2007) and Up In The Air (2009), Labor Day feels disappointingly like drudge work.
(ST)

Kepler
Stefanie Sun
Stefanie Sun is, first and foremost, a pop star.
She is not a singer-songwriter who channels her life experiences into music and words such as, say, Tanya Chua. So it is probably unrealistic to expect this new album – her first in three years, and since she got married and gave birth to her first child – to reflect entirely on her new identities as a wife and a mother.
Still, given how she has dabbled in composing and writing lyrics before, it is a bit disappointing that she does not contribute any original material here.
There are hints, though, of maternal warmth – notably on lead single Kepler. “Can’t wait for you to be my brightest star/I’m still willing to lend you my light/Projecting onto you, until your brilliant light/Gently hangs upon the distant sky,” she sings on the track she has already publicly dedicated to her 16-month-old son. Is it my imagination or is there a motherly tenderness to the way she caresses the lyrics?
What one can expect, and which Sun delivers, is a reliably listenable record delivered in that singular voice of hers.
On rousing number Infinite Possibilities, she encourages the listener: “A certain dinner with only the sounds of knife and fork/Turn a certain corner and there are infinite possibilities”.
The beautiful ballads here, such as Angel’s Fingerprints and Thirst, will no doubt scale the charts.
Some of the loveliest moments on the album are quietly tucked away near the end: she shines on the gently moving Mirage and the lightly jazzy Happier, composed by Chua.
Not quite as bold as the statementmaking Stefanie (2004) or as compelling as It’s Time (2011), Kepler remains a worthy addition to Sun’s body of work.
(ST)

The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman
Fredrik Bond
The story: After the death of his mother, Charlie Countryman (Shia LaBeouf) goes to Bucharest. There, he falls hard for Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood), a cellist married to the menacing and volatile Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen). Charlie is determined to woo the beautiful musician, even at the cost of his own life. Along the way, he crosses paths with yet another shady operator, Darko (Til Schweiger), and gets high with his dopey roommates (Rupert Grint plays one of them, Carl).

When a film such as The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman comes along, it affirms the existence of movie chemistry. Because there is none here between Charlie Countryman (LaBeouf) and Gabi (Wood).
And that is a problem when the movie is supposed to be driven by Charlie’s intense passion for Gabi.
They meet under intense circumstances as her father (Ion Caramitru) sits next to Charlie on a plane and ends up dead mid-flight.
You know Charlie is head over heels in love with the Romanian beauty the first time he lays eyes on her, a picture of grief with her mascara-streaked face, because time slows and his face lights up.
The scene feels faintly ludicrous, though, because the two leads are such an unlikely pairing. Not unlikely in a fascinating “how is this going to work out” way, more of a case of “I don’t buy this at all”.
One-time golden boy LaBeouf (Transformers, 2007, and Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, 2008) does his earnest best, but he has to work with a script in which one unlikely thing happens after another.
Charlie gets tasered at the airport, lands in a bohemian youth hostel and finds himself with wacky roommates.
As one of the British roommates, Grint puts the family-friendly Harry Potter franchise firmly behind him as he plays Carl, an aspiring porn actor who goes by the name of Boris Pecker.
He leads Charlie further down the rabbit hole after he overdoses on Viagra and creates a scene at a strip club.
Bucharest comes across as a cowboy town populated freely by thuggish gangsters such as Nigel and Darko, who create a whole lot of trouble for Gabi and Charlie because her father possessed incriminating videotape evidence of them.
It is probably safe to assume that the Romanian tourism office had nothing to do with this film. It would not have approved the lame running joke confusing Bucharest with Budapest.
The film marks the directorial debut of Fredrik Bond, a veteran of commercials and music videos who was clearly gunning for an off-kilter, crazy-cool vibe to the film.
Well, he might have partially achieved his aim. Charlie Countryman is crazy without being cool, and all I see is the mismatched couple at the centre of it.
(ST)

Eason's Life In Singapore
Singapore Indoor Stadium
Last Saturday
If life is a song for Hong Kong’s Eason Chan, it is one he sings beautifully.
His richly emotive voice is intoxicating and it is the best reason to watch and hear him perform live.
He also has a natural exuberance on stage which always makes for a fun show.
There is no need for too many bells and whistles and indeed, the stage set-up last Saturday was kept simple with a central stepped platform flanked by with two colourful shipping containers.
And so was his entrance. He bellowed in English: “Hello, welcome to my life”, and went straight into the sweetly optimistic Cantonese ballad One Thing A Day from H3M (2009).
He switched between Cantonese and Mandarin offerings from the contemplative Tourbillon to the upbeat That’s Just Life. And who cared that it was only March when he crooned the achingly tender Lonely Xmas?
Some of his songs had two versions and it was amusing watching the near-capacity crowd of 8,000 react to Under Mount Fuji. The cheers that erupted with the distinctive opening trailed off with a measure of disappointment when he sang the Mandarin version, Love Shifts, instead. When he switched to the beloved Cantonese version for the final chorus, there was a roar of approval.
His banter, too, flitted from English to Cantonese to Mandarin. A visibly happy and sweaty Chan thanked the audience for “playing with me” and joked: “Is the air-con not working or is it because your reception is too warm?”
While the stage set-up was simple, the staging of the songs often had a point of interest to them.
The most fascinating was a cloud that appeared and then you saw a man defying gravity by walking on the underside of it. Meanwhile, Chan was dressed like a beekeeper going to a funeral.
His concert sartorial choices were perhaps a bit more subdued this time round. But they still reflected a playfulness that was totally in keeping with his character.
His first outfit was white and black with what looked like strips of white cloth randomly stuck to it.
That playfulness translated into some of the material. For example, on Sha Sha Nong (which means Thank You in Shanghainese), he dueted with himself by switching between his normal range and his falsetto.
Tourbillon was yet another effectively staged number as he appeared to be standing within a cone of laser light while swathes of light swept across the darkened hall.
It was also clear that some thought had gone into the choreography as among the dancers were a mascot animal, brightly coloured muppet-like creatures and what looked like a giant puppet. They added whimsy and brought a party atmosphere to the gig.
The 2 1/2-hour-long concert ended with the retro Canto-synthpop of Zhong Kou Wei (Trap) as Chan urged his fans to get on their feet. It was an energetic end to yet another lovely treat from Asian pop’s god of song.
(ST)