Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

BoA’s new US debut album–which is in English for the first time–just dropped on March 17, under label SM Entertainment USA. It started on the Billboard 200 at #127, a rather lukewarm reception. The main problem with the music on this CD can be reduced to poor English pronunciation (some lyrics are unintelligible), and heavy abuse of auto-tune/vocoder effect. Simply because more people are using the T-Pain effect doesn’t mean an actually decent singer, like BoA, should do so for US albums…

01. I Did It For Love (Feat. Sean Garrett)
02. Energetic
03. Did Ya
04. Look Who’s Talking
05. Eat You Up
06. Obsessed
07. Touched
08. Scream
09. Girls On Top
10. Dress Off
11. Hypnotic Dancefloor

So checkout BoA-BoA (Retail) 2009-NiSHiNO for the dirty download.

Trick is the title of the unreleased seventh album from our favorite J-Pop star Koda Kumi. The release date is January 28, 2009 in Japan–we’re looking forward to it! Until then, here’s a high resolution album art:

Korean singer BoA has a new single / video combination out, and guess what, it’s in English!! According to Wikipedia, this is her very first US debut, after falling into Korean irrelevance:

On September 2, 2008, BoA’s Korean record label, SM Entertainment announced that she will make her American debut under SM’s new subsidiary label SM Entertainment USA. A press conference was held on September 10, 2008 at the Seoul Imperial Palace Hotel, to clarify the details of her American debut, with the slogan “Best of Asia, Bring on America”. SM announced that her debut single, “Eat You Up”, would be released on October 14, 2008 on the internet via iTunes and many other online stores. However the single has been pushed back to October 21, 2008.The single will be released in stores on November 11, 2008; a remix of the song features rapper Flo Rida.

The vapid lyrics start “When I first saw you I knew things weren’t like it used to be / Boy you have got to be the finest thing in history” and don’t get any better. The music video feels a decade old, the incredibly heavy digital processing on her voice ruins the song–I never knew imitation T-Pain effect existed…

The latest album from hit Chinese star Jay Chou (周杰倫), Capricorn (魔傑座), has leaked onto the internet. The guiding philosophy behind his work is “to be content with what you have” and to mix in the element of magic.

01 – 龍戰騎士
02 – 給我一首歌的時間
03 – 蛇舞
04 – 花海
05 – 魔術先生
06 – 說好的幸福呢
07 – 蘭亭序
08 – 流浪詩人
09 – 時光機
10 – 乔克叔叔
11 – 稻香

(more…)

Angel Suitcase, an album by Vicki Zhaowei (赵薇) was released September 3, 2007. Since I had trouble finding high-quality album art anywhere on the web, I’m going to post nice ones below:

Zhaowei Angel Suitcase front cover

赵薇的天使旅行箱 back cover

Also, this is the tracklist, for anyone interested:

1. 舊玩具 Old Toy
2. 天使旅行箱 Angel Suitcase
3. Morning Love
4. 多愛自己一些 Love Oneself A Little More
5. 恰恰愛 Cha Cha Love
6. 蝶 Butterfly
7. 小蜜蜂 Honeybee
8. 樹葉的崇拜 Leaf Worship
9. 不怕 Not Afraid
10. 大城小戀 Small Love In a Big City