Faye Wong - Di-Dar

When a girl (I don't remember her name) asked me last week which Faye Wong album I preferred, I spontaneously answered, well, you know, Fable, otherwise known as "Yuyan" in Chinese, with the first five songs that followed each other. For the rest of the week, I had copied my whole Chinese music collection to the laptop ("bauhinia", it was christened), and listened to a lot from it, including F.I.R., a Mandopop rock band from Taiwan that is sort of reminiscent of Japanese two guys / one girl trio in the style of Do As Infinity (more than, say, The Brilliant Green, who're somewhat more cute and cool than the D.A.I.).

So, I was saying. Come to think of it, the answer would've been true a year or two ago, but today, I think I prefer the Di-Dar album, one of Faye Wong's Cantonese albums which came out in 1995, the same year as the Teresa Teng cover album (Decadent Sound of Faye) and the year after Chungking Express and reprising The Cranberries' Dreams, to put things in perspective. I liked Sky (Tian Kong / Teen Hong) a lot, as well as Chesspiece (Qi Zi / Kei Tsi) of 1994.

Di-Dar, with the exception of the Di-Dar song itself (too much Casio), is appeasing, like a glass of Horlicks on a rainy night. It's not monotonous at all: if you listen to it from one end to the other, it goes from open loving arms, to some more restrained darker emotions (moments of doubts, I guess), before going back to languishing over there on the couch. No theme and Comet (this one in mandarin; a special track I suppose), the last two songs are definitely nightfall.

These are respectively tracks 5, 7 and 8, all the very mellow and hopeful songs:

Faye Wong - Perhaps
Faye Wong - Enjoy
Faye Wong - Half