Local Talent

What do you think about local talent?

Apart from the local TV shows like Campus Superstar (which i hate) and Superband (which i hate) and Singapore Idol (oh god), I'm happily surprised to find lots of real talent in the little red dot.

Ling86 seems to be popular:

Apart from the tempo changes which need to be done more naturally and less self-consciously and a few very careless errors, she's pretty good! I haven't gone into listening her lyrics yet.

Yeah I listen to the whole song first. I don't really process the lyrics. Too busy surfing/stoning/gaming to care. But she's got some inspiration from some poet called Larkin, so if I ever get to listen for the lyrics I guess i would appreciate her more.

But listening more and more I get more tired of her. It wears off. It's just a simple ditty.

She's good but I'd want to see her composing other styles of songs rather than "simple melody + chords = slightly intelligent yet pleasing". Only when you start mixing and matching from little genres then your work will be unique, mah.

Cover of Radiohead's Black Star:


Pretty good while it lasts. Going out of tune alot tho. Why no solo ah? Take it simple ah? Or I deaf?

Some Band Covering Aaron Kwok's Ai3:


I put in only cos the bassist is nice. 7 string bass siol. Power leh. But that's about it. He don even fucking use 5 strings.

Is it really that hard to compose a song that will be easy to listen and yet memorable? Like Terra Naomi's Up Here(i prefer it to Say It's Possible).

Hmm. Something that comes to mind is A Vacant Affair. Sarah intro me one! Their track How About Enough (which I like the most) is rerecorded one. The drums were much suckier. Seems they changed drummer or something. Now their new drummer suits their emocore sound. The Departure goes from being screamo to some kinda post-punk pseudo Good!

Plain Sunset is good also. Their River Song is original, catchy in the indie-rock way.

Sian, I wanna hear more. I say so much, but I know its really hard to play as a band in Singapore and make good nice music, let along making it big.

"Idols" on tv have no talent other than looking good and singing well. Their songs aren't self-composed; they're groomed to appear as good(read:artificial) as they can on TV. So much more to ramble here but there you go.

Local singers and bands playing self-composed music in Singapore deserve more support, for so many reasons. But the most important (and decidedly corny) is that those guys are forming music history in Singapore.

Ahhh I dunno. I end with my own band covering Sweet Child of Mine with Peter as guest: