truly reborn

alan tam, the godfather of hong kong cantopop, bulging tummy notwithstanding, is going to re-record his best-selling and legendary 1984 album "the origin of love" [愛的根源], complete with orchestra and chinese instrumentation and the title of this new album is a pompous "the best sound ever reborn".

"the origin of love" is without doubt the single most successful and influential album of its time, spawning many memorable hits and breaking into charts and winning countless awards for alan tam.

certainly a good news to younger audiophiles but to purist like me, why not leave a classic as it is and leave the perfect memories intact? besides alam tam today is not alan tam of 1984, especially his aged vocal chord. look at how disastrous air supply's audiophile album is (see under music review).

i received 4 copies of my alan tam "the best sound ever reborn" today from HK, the other 3 copies are for my dealer.

when the play button is pressed on my meridian, i was greeted with a familiar tune, title track "origin of love" played with such grandeur and grace that i uttered uncontrollably, "this is great!".

indeed, alan tam sings greatly in this album. i was wrong in my preview above. his matured voice and singing skills are still able to maintain the essence of the songs while adding a degree of polish to them. at times, alan even teases the music with syncopation, which manages to add some elements of improvisation on the music. the chinese orchestra, amusingly called the headmaster orchestra ("headmaster" is a affectionate nickname of alan tam), certainly add grandness, texture and richness to the music. the fast tracks like "summer cool breeze" (ha yat hon foong) and "marianne" are injected with steroids and sound even more uptempo and have more oomph than the originals; totally cool.

unfortunately, the recording is kind of bottled up, much like what reader canto-fanatics said in his comment - "recessed and compressed". it doesn't sound bad in my system once i blast up the volume. you really need a high-resolution and highly-resolving system to make this recording sound palatable. true to canto-fanatics' word, the recording needs to be mastered by bernie grundman and the like - food for thought for producer chan fei young.

at the end, what we have is a great recap of the golden era of cantopop, delivered in a modern style and arrangement, with more polished singing from alan tam. certainly, a must-buy for every cantopop fan.

music: 10/10
sonics : 7/10

p/s i got this from HK for RM49 and it is selling in malaysia for RM89...so malaysia boleh?