Opus 12
Jay Chou

Keep Loving
Claire Kuo

Beautiful Chaos
BearBabes

The early signs were not encouraging for Mandopop king Jay Chou’s 12th album. That blond hair. That buffed-up bod. The K-pop styling makeover gave me an ominous sense of foreboding about the music direction. It is hence a relief to find that Opus 12 is not an album of bopping dance tracks filled with inane lyrics. It also feels less kiddy compared to the deliberately cartoonish Exclamation Point (2011).
There is an ebullience here that is infectious, beginning with the chugging Train Of The Four Seasons and continuing with the giddily entertaining Dizzy Eunuch.
Chou and his long-time lyricist Vincent Fang definitely had a ball writing these songs and it shows.
The singer also roped in other vocalists on two tracks. Skip the sappy Giggle with Cindy Yen and groove along to the jazzy A Larger Cello featuring Lara Veronin and Gary Yang.
This is an album on which the faster tempo tracks outshine the ballads. From love ballad Obviously to the so-called China-style Red Dust Inn, Chou has been down these roads before to greater effect.
For that matter, so has Taiwanese sweetie-pie Claire Kuo. I sound like a broken record when it comes to her albums – nothing offensively bad but nothing to get too excited about.
Her sweet voice leaves more of an impression on breezy tunes such as The Way I Am rather than on standard ballads such as the title track Keep Loving.
She also appears in miniature amid knick-knacks in the lyric booklet. Is that supposed to be making literal a little- woman persona who yearns for love even on the number Shining Single Life?
Offering a very different sound and vibe are Taiwanese indie band BearBabes. The quintet serve up rock with distorted feedback and a skittering of electronica, defiantly finding beauty in chaos. There is celebration and positivity here.
Light Of Darkness extends an invitation of “Come on let’s dancing babe” while female lead vocalist Chang Chia-heng declares, “This is what I want”, on the track of the same name.
There is also pain and uncertainty. The lyrics for the ballad 17 go, “Life is nothing but the struggle within myself”, while Chang sings in Fisherman: “Following the wind, proudly sailing forward towards an unknown wildness, no matter how dispiriting reality is”.
Life is messy but it can be a beautiful mess, especially with music like this.
(ST)