Growing Up Wild

This is a great find – a modern journey to southern Taiwan with balladeer Lin Sheng Xiang and his Japanese guitarist-collaborator Ken Ohtake. The texts by Zhong Yongfeng are superb – conceived and sung in the Hakka dialect that’s well endowed with colourful diphthongs and rhythmic glottal stops.

There are many levels to appreciate in Growing Up Wild. It’s conceived as an album that chronicles women’s near lack of status in traditional Hakka culture. Some of the tracks also evoke the village world of the 1970s (one song refers to a Vespa) before globalisation began to take hold. All these come through in the beautifully crafted liner notes containing the original Hakka, Chinese translations, and poetic and earthy English (the latter written by Andrew Jones). Although you’re listening to an entirely foreign language spoken by a minority in southern Taiwan, you still feel close to every line, while much of the intimate guitar playing can be traced back to different strands of the Western folk idiom.

Lin’s voice is sincere and soulful: every word sounds heartfelt, especially on the final tracks. The homages to nature and bygone eras strike deep, casting an open emotional net wide. And ‘Mama, Don’t Be Afraid, Be Brave’ contains impressive guitar improvisations reminiscent of Cuba, with a universally recognisable refrain of ‘mama’. It’s rare to find an album that hooks you in from the first minute to the last without resorting to anything other than traditional, folk acoustic instruments.