...3mm
Eason Chan

Love, After All
Wan Fang

Heartbreak Is No Nig Deal
Yisa Yu

After a series of adventurous EPs, Hong Kong’s Eason Chan drops a Cantonese full-length album. His latest release opens with the retro synth-pop of Heavy Flavour, taking you immediately back to the 1980s circa A-ha’s Take On Me.
If his concerns on his excellent Mandarin album ? (2011) were broad musings on the mysteries of love and life, ...3mm addresses specific societal issues.
He muses on Class that “Money can’t buy/the cultural index”, while Swipe Card takes a swipe at consumerist culture (“Everyone’s in debt/Happily racking up emotional and monetary debts”). Together with musical collaborators Eric Kwok and Jerald Chan, both of whom are name-checked on one track, Chan has concocted a fun album packed with infectious beats – and something to mull over when the dancing stops.
Even without a propulsive rhythm section, Love, After All is compelling. Wan Fang’s voice suggests mellow sunshine and tender warmth, and the Taiwanese veteran’s latest album showcases it beautifully.
The accompaniment is clean and unfussy on ballads such as Love, After All and Daisy, relying on her pipes to tell tales brimming with gentle quotidian humanity.
In the moving Alzheimer (Silence By The Sea), composed by sodagreen’s Wu Ching-feng with lyrics by theatre director and poet Li Huan-hsiung, you can hear the ache and fragility when she croons: “Forgetting is a really happy form of cruelty/I don’t want cruelty to seem so content content content content”.
There is a literary air to the proceedings and the album is aptly packaged as a book.
China’s Yisa Yu has beautiful vocals as well, though it is in service to a more pop-varnished album. Coming soon on the heels of Add A Little Happiness (2011), there is clearly a concerted effort to turn her into the next Queen of Ballads.
But the title track feels a little too safe and a little too expected. It seems to hark back to the last record’s more affecting Can’t Afford To Get Hurt as she sings about love gone wrong: “Who says heartbreak’s no big deal, only know when it’s gone/Can’t even control my emotions, who dares disturb.”
The light-as-air mid-tempo charmer Dress is a pleasant change of pace. Better yet, it was penned by Yu herself, suggesting that her music could get more interesting – if she gets a bigger say in it.
(ST)