SECOND SIGHT is the last of Tracy Huang's English albums that I have not heard.
The first general impression I have of the album is that it leaves a generally unpleasant flavour. There is a upbeat and buoyant feel that runs like an unbroken thread throughout the album which serves to enliven it. Tracy's vocals here are stable and consistent in quality, and packed with a bit more punch as compared to her voice during her early EMI days. The choice of songs, too, is rather safe and predictable. The album therefore remains a rather palatable effort.
However, the biggest flaw of the album is that it is colourless and lacking in musical character, so that it cannot be called a genuinely coherent album. As with my major grouse with most of Tracy's other English albums, the selection of songs in SECOND SIGHT appears to be purely based on what would appeal to the popular tastes of the 80s, rather than on whether these songs have any lasting meaning and significance, and whether they allow Tracy to reveal different facets of her voice. As a result, we get a sad motley collection of songs whose words do not say anything of much consequence or worth. Indeed, the lyrics of the various songs, DOWN TO THE PARTY, ROCK N' ROLL THAT'S ALL, LEAVE ME ALONE and TEDDY BEAR, just to quote a few dismal examples, show just how words can be amount to little more than babble. These songs evoke neither thought nor emotion in the listener; they neither tell stories nor offer sensitive or provocative perspectives of life; they are simply words attached to a melody.
The exceptions to the album are MEMORY and MOONLIGHT SHADOW. Both these are far more evocative and thought provoking that the other nine songs put together. MEMORY, in particular, is full of the regret and wasted desolation of life, captured in the dying lights of street lamps, and the "burnt out ends of smoky days, the stale cold smell of morning". However, the poor choice of songs causes MEMORY to sound extremely incongruous when included in the same album with numbers like TEDDY BEAR.
Why am I labouring this point about selecting of songs that say something to the listener? After all, it may be argued, pop songs are essentially meaningless ditties whose lifespan are so short that they are forgotten almost as soon as they are sung. It may also be argued that al her musical career Tracy Huang has been doing these types of commercialised songs very successfully, and that therefore there is no need for her to change.
Yes, songs that are manufactured on the conveyor belts of the pop music industry are by and large hollow and lifeless products. Yet, we know of singers who have tried to weave greater artistic significance into the pop songs they sing; singers who try to inject a slice of themselves and facets of their lives into the songs they craft. Ultimately, it is these singers whose works will be regarded more seriously, and who will be regarded as more genuine musicians and craftsmen of music. Similarly, if Tracy Huang were to be simply content with doing insignificant cover versions, she will at best only be remembered as a singer with little depth or musical creativity. Without trying to find a more individualised and personal voice in the English numbers that she does, she may ultimately remain as a singer who merely sang cover versions simply because they were the hottest tunes of the time. Surely, Tracy Huang has the potential to do better than that.
The inherently poor choice of material seriously reduces Tracy's scope of expression as well as limits her from stretching her vocal possibilities. Therefore, her voice sounds extremely uniform throughout the album, with little, or no, hint, of any variation, nuance or subtlety. She simply bulldozes her way through many of the numbers with the result that DONG DIKKI DIKKI DONG, SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN and SAD SONGS sound very much like replicas of one another. On other numbers like DOWN TO THE PARTY and ROCK N' ROLL THAT'S ALL, Tracy screams as loudly as she can but that is all that she does.
The fundamental weaknesses in Tracy's voice are revealed glaringly in the potentially beautiful and haunting number, MEMORY. As I have described above, MEMORY is a song about the regret as life becomes wasted like dying embers, soon to be extinguished to form cold ashes. It is however, also a song about the possibilities of rejuvenation, of gathering the broken fragments of life and trying to piece them together again, of learning from the regrets of life's experiences and follies. As such, the song provides a lot of scope for Tracy to express the myriad conflicting emotions that such a person, after passing through the vagaries of life, would feel. However, Tracy fails to rise to the occasion. Her singing initially is pure and crystal clear, but it soon falls into a monotonous rhythm and she merely mouths the words without expressing them; there is no sadness, no wistfulness, regret, pain, no fluttering hope or passion in her voice, just a dutiful uniformity in vocal texture that takes the song from beginning to end. One need only compare her dismal and lacklustre singing here to the emotive and nuanced one by Elaine Paige to understand just how glaring the difference is.
Again and again I have lamented the lack of expressiveness in Tracy's voice, be it in her Mandarin or English works. Although Tracy may be a veteran singer, I still maintain that when a voice lacks the ability to move the listener, to thrill and cut to the bone, it will never amount to a great voice. In this regard, therefore I still think that Tracy has a lot to learn. She has to learn to inject a bit of her heart into her singing, the way she did in OUT HERE ON MY OWN, where at least her voice revealed more depth and texture.
Still on the subject of Tracy's vocal performance on this album, I am surprised as to the stark differences in the sound of SECOND SIGHT and that of her early albums under EMI. In some of the songs like DOWN TO THE PARTY, LEAVE ME ALONE and ROCK N' ROLL THAT'S ALL her voice has been deliberately adulterated and mixed, with the effect that it sounds slightly robotic and unnatural. There is a harder, more grating metallic edge to her voice that is not completely pleasant to the ears. Added to the extremely loud and raucous noise that tries to pass itself off as music, the overall result sounds like a commercially manufactured product without flesh and blood.
Even on the other songs where the mixing is not so excessive I sense that there is something crucial missing in Tracy's voice. Perhaps the extremely artificial synthesized pop music feel to the album has adulterated and contaminated her voice, which now sounds run of the mill, distant and impersonal. Perhaps the way the recording and mixing is done causes her voice to sound emotionally shallow and texturally hollow. Perhaps the poor choice of songs just gave her very little room to demonstrate her vocal abilities. Whatever it may be, the commercialised feel of the entire album has added many layers of obstructions between Tracy's voice and her listener. The original simplicity and direct straightforwardness when she once did MAKING BELIEVE and LONG LONG TIME has been destroyed, along with the freshness and clean innocence and purity of her early voice.
Very little praise, too, can be given for the music arrangement. The music, like the voice, lacks texture and sophistication, even though it ironically tries to sound sophisticated and modern.
Overall, as an album, SECOND SIGHT even pales in comparison with CHANGES. CHANGES at least has more character in that it included songs which boasted more dimension and variety, from the attempt to do rock music in I'M ALL CONFUSED, to the heavy sounds of HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN, to the chirpy and catchy tune of THESE EYES. CHANGES also gave Tracy more chances to stretch her vocal abilities and though she may not be very successful in some of the songs, she at least explores future directions for her voice. SECOND SIGHT, however, errs on the side of predictability and uniformity, and thus sinks into a boring blandness with little to redeem it.
However, as with most other Tracy Huang efforts, ultimately, there remains at the very least some sparkle and glitter in the overall effort. There is the usual indescribable luminosity, that luscious and infectious warmth in Tracy's voice that makes the songs DONG DIKKI DIKKI DONG, SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE OCEAN etc vibrant and dynamic. The catchiness that lies at the very heart of the album, captured in Tracy's clean vocals, is very infectious, and reveals a more upbeat and wild side to the singer that we have not seen before. Even the local compositions like DOWN TO THE PARTY and LEAVE ME ALONE contain a direct and unpretentious energy that makes them far superior to the subsequent Dick Lee ballads (ALL THAT YOU ARE, PRETENDING, PARADISE IN MY HEART, TRACES OF LOVE etc) which Tracy did.
Tracy's best effort in the entire album is MOONLIGHT SHADOW. On one level, the song is inherently captivating, with the sad tale of violence, death and parting that it tells. Tracy's voice here is fluid and breezy, while the energy of the guitars uplifts the songs, increases its momentum and propels it forward.
On a final note, what I find interesting about both CHANGES and SECOND SIGHT is how consciously both Tracy and her producers tried to move as far away as possible from the style of her EMI releases. As a result, both these Polygram albums contain predominantly upbeat and fast numbers. There was also a conscious effort to try out different, radical styles of music that listeners would not normally associate with Tracy Huang. In short, it was perhaps a calculated move to revamp Tracy, to create a new snazzy and sophisticated image for her as the modern and fashionable singer, complete with designer clothes and heavy make up. In many ways these two albums therefore marked an important and radical milestone for Tracy Huang as she shed her fresh faced appeal and innocence of her early days and metamorphosed into the glamorous and chic woman of the 80s. This was an important step for her because she simply could not remain in the groove that was created during her EMI days. Whether she liked it or not, she had to move forward.
The result of her very sudden change meant that her new musical sense was still very raw and inarticulate at that point in time: she wanted to try something different without knowing how to do it, therefore leading to the innumerable embarrassing mistakes she made in CHANGES and SECOND SIGHT. Particularly in the latter, Tracy explored new ground as she tried to sing original compositions of local composers. Sadly, however, her effort to be original, and move away from being just a singer of cover versions to a real singer who sang her own songs, failed.
However, I think that these two albums are nonetheless very important because they opened many different possibilities for her. From then she managed to decisively move away from doing the ballads and Olivia Newton John stereotype that have always been attached to her. Although DOWN TO THE PARTY and LEAVE ME ALONE are not the perfect fast dance tracks around, they nevertheless led to the possibilities of her music becoming more avant garde and fast paced, for instance, in the songs on her most recent Mandarin album, CRAZY FOR LOVE. As listeners would have noticed by now, Tracy Huang's music has always been in a constant state of flux, and SECOND SIGHT is no different.
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