Sundown Festival 2012
Marina Promenade
Last Saturday

The idea of a music festival celebrating popular music from across Asia is a promising one. But in its execution, the Sundown Festival was not quite satisfying.
In the first place, the line-up of acts was too disparate with its inclusion of newcomer K-pop boyband BTOB (say “B to B”), Japanese visual kei rock band Alice Nine and Hong Kong singer-actor Raymond Lam. There was also singer-songwriter Anthony Neely from Taiwan and popster Jeno Liu from China thrown in the mix.
Perhaps a line-up with a stronger link among the acts – say, singer-songwriters from across the region – might have worked better. As it stood, the list of offerings was best described as eclectic.
The sense of an anything-goes approach to programming was further strengthened by warm-up items such as a traditional face-changing performance, a snatch of Chinese opera and a lion dance performed to a modern dance track.
It also did not help the music performances that the artists were mostly performing to minus-one tracks. It is no coincidence that the best performance of the night was by the full-fledged band Alice Nine.
While the five members were dressed rather tamely in black and white, their segment was anything but. Lead vocalist Shou announced at the beginning of their set “Here we go!” and off they went. They cranked up the volume and excitement level, and delivered a blistering blast of rock with electric guitars racing away.
One wondered how Lam, who is better known for his television dramas than for his songs, was going to top that as the act following them. Well, he did not.
While everyone else performed for about half an hour, his was a mercifully short 15-minute set. He sang three Cantonese numbers and one of them was spent serenading a lucky fan who got to go on stage. Lucky for the fan, cheesily painful for the rest of the audience.
Neely fared better with a mix of Mandopop and English songs. He seemed to hold nothing back as he belted out songs such as Dear Death and Wake Up in his husky vocals.
Best of all, he trotted out his guitar, Audrey, and performed an acoustic version of the achingly beautiful ballad Hallelujah written by Leonard Cohen. It was an unexpected song that turned into a welcome highlight.
Liu shimmered in a gold top during her turn on stage but seemed to have a little problem getting the crowd to sing along. So she offered a bribe of supper and then joked that she would go bankrupt, given the size of the crowd. About 6,000 music fans attended the festival.
BTOB might be new, but they had no lack of screaming fans as the seven members sang and danced through their set in matching blazers.
Still, while K-pop might be trumping J-pop in the popularity stakes at the moment, on Saturday night though, it was J-pop which brought the house down.
(ST)