Sell Like Hot Cakes
Yoga Lin
Never mind the English album title, which is as bald-faced a statement as it gets. The Chinese title Jin Ri Ying Ye Zhong, Open For Business Today, is less in-your-face, referring to Taiwanese singer Yoga Lin’s return to the music scene after completing his military service last year.
There is a sense of him starting things on a clean slate on opening track Let It Die. “Let the world be destroyed/ Let everything turn to ash, all absurdities end/Let me be destroyed,” he sings.
In other words, this is not quite business as usual for Lin.
There is the surprise of his first Cantonese track, the ballad Worse Comes To Worst, and he does a good job with Wyman Wong’s incisive lyrics: “When everything is bad and you can still be happy, that’s a sublime state.”
He also hints at greater maturity in Spoiled Innocence when he laments: “Do you know the cruellest thing you’ve done/Is to cruelly turn me into a man overnight?”
Some things do not change, though, and there is nothing wrong with that – Lin’s evocative pipes are in fine form and his penchant for musical adventure continues to be given free rein.
And so we get the catchy uptempo rock of Unshakeable Rascals, the loungy jazz of Courage To Remember You and the elegiac ballad Tiny Part Of You, which he composed.
Good to have Lin back in business. And, who knows, the album may just sell like hot cakes.
(ST)