(Thanks to Meredith Oyen for lyrics translations.)
After a 2006 album that too often made me hit the Next Track button, Mayday looked backward to create Poetry of the Day After. And though the new album doesn't reach the heights of the band's best work, it's a step in the right direction.
Poetry is a retrospective album in two ways. First, it picks up on musical styles from Mayday's earlier eras, usually with good results. Second, there's a consistent lyrical theme about the passage of time. This is a favorite topic of Ashin's, and tapping into it, he's written what may be his strongest set of lyrics yet.
Interestingly, this follows his weakest lyrical effort, Born To Love, which was filled with ham-handed love songs. On Poetry, it's obvious from the very first line -- "I'm most afraid of a sudden stillness, most afraid of friends' concern" -- that Ashin has put in a lot more effort this time out. The imagery is clear and the emotions vivid. In "Like Smoke," which takes the album's dark theme to its greatest extreme, he asks:
Is there really that kind of world, where the sky never goes dark, the stars and sun and everything listen to my commands / The moon doesnŐt wax and wane, spring isnŐt far away, twigs hold tightly onto their leaves, can anyone hear me?
The existential angst of the first album is back, beautifully burnished by the passage of time. And as on Mayday, it shows up even in unlikely places. On the very upbeat Track 2, "More Than Surviving, Less Than Living," Ashin finds himself "Unequal to an insect that has at least broken through its cocoon, stretched its wings to fly, snatching that bit of sky, day by day."
Every track contains gems like that, and lyrically, there isn't a weak song on the album. Which means Mayday has come at least halfway back from the relative slump of Falling Angels With a Flying Soul and Born To Love.
Both of those albums had good songs; the former even had great ones. But neither had the kinds of definitive tracks that brought the band to superstardom on its first three albums, nor the wildly successful risk-taking of Time Machine. With commercial success and a calendar full of endorsement jobs, Mayday seemed to find itself in a musical drift.
Now, you can hear the band's renewed effort in the polished lyrics, reduced repetition, and even Ashin's voice, which he strains as never before on a studio album. The effect is grating at times, but it's good to hear him on the edge again.
While Poetry is a triumph lyrically, it's a mixed bag when it comes to music. The band rocks harder than it has in years on some tunes, while going softer than ever on ballads. I'll get the worst out of the way to start with: "Suddenly Missing You" and "You're Not Truly Happy" are pure Mandopop treacle. Formless strings, waves of synthesizer, crooning vocals, the whole deal. Other ballads, such as Monster's "The Yet Unbroken Part of My Heart" and Stone's "Like Smoke," are far more original but still tend to drift. Even the brief title track is a bit slight.
One clear improvement, on both ballads and upbeat songs, is the end of the octave changes and multiple choruses that led to so much Next Track action with Born To Love. Weak or strong, the songs on Poetry are all coherent: there's nothing needlessly tacked on at the end.
With this album's rock songs, the band looks deep into its musical past, with mixed results. "Spring's Scream," named after the annual indie rock festival in southern Taiwan that helped Mayday get its start, recaptures the edgy sound of Taipei club rock of that era. "Liver Busting" has some of the percussive rock-rap sound of the Time Machine period. But neither one is a great song.
The band fares better on "OMG," a crowd-raiser in the vein of "Little Nurse" and "Offering to Heaven." It may be Mayday's most danceable song yet, with a great, simple melody and multiple hooks. In concert, it could easily take the place of the overplayed "LOVE-ing." The album's other happy tune, "The Song of Laughter and Forgetting," recalls the breezy anthems of the past without quite becoming a classic itself.
But a couple of songs manage to both recapture and surpass the earlier work that inspired them. "More than Surviving, Less than Living," picks up the daily-grind theme of "My Life" from the first album and has a creative arrangement befitting that era of Mayday's career. Masa's music is clean, bright and catchy, like a Michael Wong song, with amusing sound effects -- brushing teeth, water running, a motor starting -- added on top of the strummy guitar backing. It's the kind of acoustic achievement Mayday was reaching for on its first album, but more sonically polished, with all the freshness of that record preserved.
Track 6, "Breakthrough Day," is a clear followup to the title track of People Life, Ocean Wild, with Ashin reiterating his belief in a brighter day in the future. It stands out from his long string of songs on this theme with a stark arrangement and the wise choice of Hokkien for the vocals. Everything, from the crashing drums at the beginning to the singalong at the end, captures the essence of Mayday in terms of message and music.
But the album's best track looks forward. "Interview With The Vampire" isn't quite like anything Mayday has done before. The music is by Guanyou, which marks a happy breakthrough for the band in its attempt to branch out from Ashin's writing. Every member has now contributed to one of Mayday's greatest songs: Monster with "Nine Ball" (and others), Stone with "Goodnight, Earthlings," Masa with "John Lennon," and now Guanyou with this song. His musical studies in Los Angeles during the 2001-2003 hiatus have paid off at last, with a piece that's like a Steely Dan song without the L.A. fusion duo's smug vocals and antiseptic production. "Vampire" trades those in for Ashin's passionate singing and some blistering guitar. Not surprisingly, the lyrics are dark, but the song steadily builds into Mayday's deepest groove ever.
I hope "Vampire" was the last song the band recorded for Poetry and that more experimentation like this is coming on the next album. We may be headed for another golden age of Mayday yet.