Mui Zyu
★★★
Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century
FATHER/DAUGHTER. CD/DL/LP
Anglo-Chinese debutante’s avant-pop adventure.
Eva Liu’s solo debut could be labelled dream-pop, but it’s a daring, even disorientating version, coalescing around a quest for identity befitting an artist with roots in Hong Kong and Britain but feeling an outsider in both. Rotten Bun… refreshes the genre’s standard contrast between sugary melody and heavier backdrop by embracing Liu’s Cantonese heritage (folk and modern pop tropes) or starkly pitching her honeyed voice against industrial rhythm or distorted ambience, like she’s a ghost in a machine. Shapeshifting from Sore Bear’s Twin Peaks-y ballad to Paw Paw’s gothic mass to Ghost With A Peach Skin’s electro-pop (laced with a plucked zither) whilst throwing lyrical curveballs (a feverish Rotten Bun documents “a drink that blinks with a mouldy sprout” and “warriors whose kisses burn in hell”), the album is initially hard to grasp, but its uncanny hooks and moods make the long-haul worthwhile.