Lucinda Chua “YIAN” Album Review

YIAN

Lucinda Chua

• Genre: Alternative
• Date: 24 Mar, 2023
• Content: Not-explicit
• Region: NGA
• Track(s): 10
• ℗ 2023 4AD Ltd

The Chinese word yian, or yàn (燕), is used to describe a swallow, a migratory bird that heralds the arrival of spring and is frequently shown in maobi paintings, children’s songs, girl’s names, and superstitions. Lucinda Chua portrays both the swallow and the swallowed in her largely self-produced debut full-length, “YIAN.” The swallowed is a body that is consumed by something bigger than itself.

The cellist and producer from London has dedicated years to uncovering the subtle interiorities of melancholy and longing. Her previous EPs, Antidotes 1 and Antidotes 2, both released in 2019 and 2021, included sensitive glimpses of changing emotions and moments in time. In contrast, “YIAN” broadens out and offers narrative rather than just vignettes, frequently based on the artist’s personal experiences as a Chinese diaspora child.

Album Cover Art

Lucinda is suspended mid-air for her new album cover. She also rocks the sultry aesthetic of some sort of angel, implied by the prosthetic wings. She’s also showing confidence in her body and style as she flaunts her bosoms in a nearly transparent milk colored covering over her upper body. She is just relaxed in her essence.

Tracks and Features

Glassy strings played sul ponticello cross one another in the somber “Autumn Leaves Don’t Come.” As though in search of an anchorage, Chua’s voice grows thicker like rope as she casts it outward. Chua fashions landscapes from the voids inside of her in this song as well as throughout the entire album. Each track turns into a safe harbor or a kind of a home in its own right. Ravel’s impressionistic warmth and Sibelius’ frigid landscapes are both evoked in the orchestral “Meditations on a Place.” Low strings swell, a bass drone gently beats, and violin tremolo shimmers like light on water.

“Grief Piece” floats around the desolate landscapes of its namesake. The matrix is distorted by digital distortion, much as the brain is damaged by sadness. On the album, Chua weaves together the strands that connect family, the past, and how these things relate to the body. Lead song “Echo” is a subdued declaration of independence from traumatic family history. Chua discovers a need to set these boundaries as well as to cross others when tending to her wounds. A cello line that is vibrating blooms over aquatic backup vocals on the song “You.” Chua’s voice arcs like a bridge as he tries to reconnect with a relationship that has become distant over time and due to previous events.

On “Do You Know, You Know?” the idea of a shared psychic environment is also hinted to. The musician sings while a train-like whistle blares through a layer of synth reverb. Even while a definitive answer is elusive, the disappearance of personal boundaries raises the prospect of new growth. Chua is able to reclaim herself in a way by sublimating the self—by unlearning and being.

She finds liberation in the album’s highlight song, “An Ocean,” not in earthbound love but rather in the tides that transport her away from its beaches and towards a place of her own. The sea that previously separated the two, causing pain, is now a source of strength. She invites the prospect of regeneration, of spring, by allowing herself to feel loss and be lost.

Chua performs a duet with the ethereal-voiced Yeule on the album’s closing track, “Something Other Than Years,” two voices that are both uprooted by and rooted in diaspora. Warm melodies carry the sparrow upwards like thermals until, in a crystalline flame, she returns to the fog from which she originally emerged.

Tracklist

NO	TITLE	TIME
1	Golden	4:06
2	Meditations on a Place	2:31
3	I Promise	3:20
4	“You”	3:22
5	An Ocean	4:19
6	Autumn Leaves Don’t Come	3:58
7	Echo	4:05
8	Do You Know, You Know?	5:12
9	Grief Piece	2:16
10	Something Other Than Years	4:10

Album Theme

Chua, who was born to a white British mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father, seeks both a connection to her ancestry and freedom from the traumas she acquired from it. As a result, a significant portion of the album is devoted to traversing murky, transitional areas and redefining her relationship to them.

Production Credits

Kin Leonn & Lucinda Chua took care of production.

Stream