By Keith Walsh
Listening to the music of The Analog Girl is an awesomely mysterious experience. And with the new release, “Awe,” her music reaches new levels of intrigue. The tunes merely flirt with melody, emphasizing rhythm and synthesizer textures, with Mei Wong’s sultry vocals hidden somewhere in the middle of the mix. Along with the trippy beats, seductive flanged waveforms and electronic percussion, the effect is intoxicating.
“Awe” is The Analog Girl’s most downtempo album, with a palette of sounds submerged in washes of synths and drumbeats, following a trend set by her previous album. When asked if she is intentionally creating a sense of mystery, she replies: “Not really, actually! Sometimes the songs just take on a shape of their own.” That shape is most often a dreamy, euphoric escape. A song like “Different World” talks of a dreamlike alternate reality, while “I Feel On The Top Of The World” also describes a sensuous loss of control that’s not completely undesired. It’s Wong’s longing for a perfect world, or for a perfect state of being that underlies this album, as well as much of her earlier work. Indeed the lead single from the album, “Feeling Light,” finds The Analog Girl longing for that most desirable of elements, Light.
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I asked Wong, in an email exchange, about the reasons behind the mixing down of her vocals, and she assures me that it’s something that has been less prominent in her works of late. “I do have plans to release instrumental versions of the album for that matter, but the story is as important as the music for songs on this album,” Wong writes. “For earlier albums, I used to sing whatever was phonetically pleasing, with much less regard for lyrics. But with newer releases, I focus my efforts towards telling a story, or relating an emotion. I think I may like my reverb and echo a tad much hence the drowning of vocals, haha!”
There’s an idealism at work here. I asked Wong, is it the machines she works with that drive the creation of the songs, or something else? She replies: “I always just set out to write the quintessential love song, or pop song. What it ends up as, sometimes is beyond my control, and I will still include them on the album if I find the vibe to be right. Recurring themes I like to write about are the push and pull feelings of love, and how inescapable falling in love can be – I guess that is the lyrical content that drives the slower numbers.”
The attitude of “Awe”is laid back, for the most part. It’s an atmospheric album, and the vocals do a lot to define that attitude. “Maybe my vocal style has evolved over the years, and my voice is going through some changes as well. None of that was intentional though. I did, however, attempted to do many vocal takes for some of the tracks on there, and pick the best of the lot – something I never really used to do. I used to just do that one take, sometimes, even when the lyrics don’t make sense. But I like to see I am spending more time crafting the songs with this one. I am also going for that cruise-y vibe on some of the tracks with the new album, hence the sense of laid-backness?”
What sets The Analog Girl apart from so much of the electronica that lacks a storyteller’s soul, is that Wong is a singer songwriter working within the limits conscribed by songs driven by a mechanical heart.
In an earlier interview with Perfect Sound Forever, Mei shared with me that as a child in Singapore, she was a huge fan of the TV show Solid Gold and the music of the 70s. Now she says that these childhood influences are stronger than ever. “One of the melody lines for the intro track was inspired by the 1970s theme songs kind of vibe, or maybe just 1970s instrumentals,” she writes. ” I can’t think of a song in particular at the moment, only ‘The Love Boat’ comes to mind for now. I have also been listening to Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’, but that was towards the end of the making of the album. Perhaps more of her would surface in upcoming releases.”
That’s certainly a provocative proposition.
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