#悦与歌2022Album Recommendation- Hong Jiahao's "Learning Curve"

on Jun 22, 2022 0 comments

📝 [Written by @delightcantopop ] 🎵

#Joy and Song 2022 Album Recommendation

Just entering his fifth year of debut, Hong Jiahao officially released his first "double-disc album" "Learning Curve" (he released the digital EP "Curiosity" in 2018), which includes a total of 15 works. This album is divided into two parts: "Experience" and "Experiment".

Let’s talk about CD1 “Experience” first, which includes a total of nine songs released since “Locker No. 10” in 2019, as well as a never-before-seen work “24/7 Lover”. Although I have heard most of these songs before, I feel they are quite fresh when I listen to them again after sorting the tracks. Even though Kaho's song library in the past two years is mostly pop karaoke, three of the synth pop works stand out in this sequence, especially "Love in the Curve" which is particularly interesting after "Poor Boy". The first song to be released in the album, "Locker No. 10", is placed at the end of CD1, symbolizing that the various experiences of the past three years are put into the "memory locker", which is also very thoughtful.

CD2 is the "music experiment" that Kaho has been talking about before. He personally composed the composition, lyrics, arrangement, supervision and singing of all five songs, including the earlier released "Living Target" and the most recent released work "Rescue". Kaho has always been good at composing music. She can create popular songs like "Poor Boy" that are instantly catchy, and she can also create songs like "I Say No" and "Curved Love" that are relatively rare in Cantonese songs and are playful and lively. Therefore, I have always trusted Kaho in composing music. But when it comes to writing lyrics and arranging music, Kaho has seldom dabbled in it before. This time, seeing him handling the lyrics and arrangement of five songs in one go, we can see his skills. These five songs are not bad. I quite like "Living Target" and "Fire Door" among them, but the atmosphere of the whole album is very similar, especially the arrangement has very few changes, so it feels like "one song divided into five sections". The attractiveness of the melody is also overshadowed by the monotonous arrangement, which is a pity. However, since it is just an experiment, I think this approach is not a bad idea. But when I start a new project in the future, it might be better to consider asking more professional people to do the lyrics and music arrangement work and gain experience.

All good, in my mind, Hong Jiahao is worthy of support and deserves more attention from everyone, so I pre-ordered this disc as soon as it came out. In September, he will have another show with MC Zhang Tianfu, in a larger venue than last year's MacPherson Stadium. Hopefully, more people will be lucky enough to see it!