Joi Chua
Local singer Joi Chua has moved on from her long-time sweet, demure image since 2012’s electronica-tinged Gains from her EP, Perspectives – and she is not looking back.
“I won’t be silent, silent, silent/I don’t want to go along, go along, go along/I don’t care about right or wrong/I just want to be me,” she sings in the mid-tempo title track of her new release, I Am Me, where she had a hand in composing all its eight tracks.
Even as she sports a trendy asymmetric crop on the cover, she still embraces the melodic and lightly melancholic ballads that she made her name with, such as Watching The Sunrise With Me and Waiting For A Sunny Day.
Bystander in the new work is a lovely ballad that plays nicely to her strength. She is smart enough to know that there is no need to chuck out what has been proven to work in the name of a makeover, which includes slightly more uptempo tracks that strike a more unusual note for Chua (the breezy See-saw and the dance-tinged Happiness That’s Late In Coming).
Over an accompaniment of hand claps, she glides into her higher range in the chorus of Happiness: “I believe love is just late a step, it hasn’t lost its way/Don’t be too quick to admit defeat, even if the whole world has started to take note of you.”
She is doggedly keeping the faith even when others have stopped believing.
(ST)