sodagreen “Walk Together” Tour – Singapore
Max Pavilion @ Singapore Expo
Last Friday

The albums of Taiwanese indie band sodagreen are always a treat to listen to. But there is nothing quite like experiencing them live to get the full impact of their peerless musicality.
It has been three years since the six members performed together as guitarist Ho Jing-yang and keyboardist-violinist Kung Yu-chi were serving out their military service stints. It sounds like they were never away from the way the music flowed.
Frontman Wu Ching-feng shone with his crystal-clear high-pitched voice and he was tireless over the almost 31/2- hour-long concert. He is such an evocative singer that he can take on a familiar hit such as Stefanie Sun’s Cloudy Sky and make you feel like you are hearing it for the first time.
On the delicate Stopping At Each Station, he flits between his higher and lower registers like the butterfly of the song.
It was also impressive the way the band could pull off almost any song request, though Wu would also blithely ignore cries for a number he did not feel like singing.
In the case of early hit Little Universe, he finally relented – by singing the lalala chorus.
The theme for this concert was Walk Together, the title of a song found on their latest album What Is Troubling You (2011). More specifically, it was about heading home to the warmth of family.
There was a video clip of the band members talking about their parents and Wu shared a moving song he had written for his late father, When I Was Young.
And when he sang Come Home Soon from Daylight Of Spring (2009), he asked if the audience wanted to go home soon and the response was a resounding “No!” from the 4,500-strong crowd.
There was a segment when sodagreen performed songs Wu had written for other singers. He quipped that it was like having children put up for adoption brought back home for a short while.
Indeed, Eason Chan’s A Trouble Like This and Rainie Yang’s Youthful Troubles sounded perfectly at home at a sodagreen show.
There were other surprises as well. Wu flirted with a stanza of Coldplay’s Yellow before segueing into A-mei’s My Dearest. There was also an uproarious mash-up of The Lonely Goatherd from the musical The Sound Of Music (1959) and Harlem Yu’s Minnan number Black Dog Man On The Mountaintop. It was a strange-sounding pairing that worked and it was worth it just to hear Wu yodelling away.
While the band might be better known for their ballads, they could also step it up and get the crowd pumping with rockers such as Fever.
They even devised some simple dance moves on Control Freak for the crowd to dance along to and then amped up the genteel Daylight to end the set on a rousing note.
Adding to the entertainment value was Wu’s welcome sense of theatricality. He sported a dramatic smear of red and blue eyeshadow over his left brow and could always be counted on to say something funny, cutting or outrageous.
When the band members came off the stage and did their walkabouts, Wu kept order with both the stick and carrot. He jokingly threatened to cancel the concert if people did not return to their seats and then announced he would head to whichever section was the most orderly.
He even made the usually dry thank-you segment fun by keeping up a patter of commentary as photographs of the behind-the-scenes personnel in wigs flashed onto the screen.
More of the Wu Ching-feng variety show was seen during the encore when he challenged guitarist Liu Jia-kai to shoot for the ending high notes in the duet I Wrote Of You In My Song – and then moving up the register as Liu nailed each attempt.
The encore ended with the gospel- tinged What Is Troubling You as some fans, mostly togged out in sodagreen T-shirts, streamed onstage and everyone sang along. It was a moment that felt as cosy and comfortable as home.
(ST)