I prefer to call Li Yu's fourth album "Creation" the fourth time. Even if this is a complete album, in Li Yu's entire musical career, it is still a node with a previous introduction and unfinished continuation, synchronizing her life understanding and musical state.
This is indeed where Li Yu is different from many singers. Most musicians, many times, still use creation to create an album and create a music world. And Li Yu's works are more like the result of creation, because of creation, so there is "Creation".
There's creation and there's evolution. Li Yu, on the other hand, uses music to turn evolution into evolution.
If you still use the music labels when Li Yu debuted, to listen to the album "Creation", there will definitely be a sense of "unrecognizable" listening. But from the perspective of musical development, Li Yu has indeed changed, but Li Yu can actually be said to have not changed.
What has not changed is Li Yu's sensitivity to melody all along, and the combing and processing of musical lines. All of this, especially in "Wind and Rain Bridge" at the end of the album, can make people feel clearer.
It is still the rhyme of the country farmhouse, melodious and full of dust. The works are like Ming and Qing dynasty scripts, and they are like traveling through time and space, not the national style of plastic flavor, but from the music, they can hear architecture, hear human feelings, hear young people and old times. More importantly, there is also the humanity heard from those beautiful Chinese words and rhymes.
Human nature is the theme of Li Yu's previous album, and it is also the theme of this album. If she in the previous album was angry and explosive about the world, then in the album "Creation", Li Yu used a more complex creative structure and texture, and used humor, introspection, jokes, arrogance and other emotions to combine a more beautiful and even magnificent world.
If you think the album sounds crazy, it's because the world is inherently crazy.
If you think that the album "Creation" is an album that is not easy to appreciate, not easy to enter, and even makes you a little confused, then my suggestion can start with the song "Legend of Drumming".
The eerie electronic rhythm, with a bit of exotic mysterious tone, seems to be a fantasy drama, a little absurd and a little absurd, but the plot is a familiar recipe, a realistic taste. Too many rumors and storms, too many viewers and keyboard heroes, the legendary Internet, let us interconnect and reach, in every inch, you can cross the heavens and the earth.
But at the same time, this interconnection also allows evil to spread and spread indefinitely, and "drumming and passing flowers" has grown into a Plus version, endless relay, unlimited loop, and finally become a strange game.
After experiencing a carnival, Li Yu used a song "This Evil" to restrain emotions and make rationality reflect. The scene in "This Evil" jumps out of your eyes and makes you shudder, there is a cause of evil, but also the effect of evil.
If "Ben Evil" is a reality, then "Forest of Life" and "Fly" are a kind of self, an answer provided by Li Yu in this crazy world, and paid for action. The inaction of "Forest of Life" and the omnipotence of "Fly" are two attitudes, and they are also the two possibilities that Li Yu provides for the future with music.
These two possibilities, through the dreams and adventures of "Flowing Fireworks", through the faint light in the music, find a more certain exit, and it is precisely with this exit that the "original evil" is born because of music and creation.
Under these evil themes, Li Yu's expressive female voice, while interweaving a sense of contradiction, complexity and conflict, gives the work more room for echo.
So, even on the surface, "Creation" is not an easy album to listen to, but it is still a good album, because the good melody has always been hidden under those rich musical texts.
If works such as "Ben Evil", "Forest of Life", "Fly" and "Legend of Drumming" still have a strong sense of individual substitution, then "Spring Cold", "Twelve Elephants of the Desolate Mountains", "Flowing Crows", "Burning Sun Cambodia" these works, Li Yu prefers to present the vastness of the world through musical brushes, to dialectical the relationship between macro and micro.
"Upside Down" talks about human nature from the seasons, "The Twelve Elephants of the Desolate Ridge" is a certain evolution of "creation", and "Flowing Crows" is like the musical version of "Crows in the Wheat Field", which makes van Gogh's classic paintings, which have been controversial, more than a perspective because of another abstract image.
In fact, Li Yu in these works will even really give people a feeling of Van Gogh painting. Intense tones, uneasy atmospheres, tense emotions, turbulent worlds, extreme magic...
It's just that Van Gogh used a paintbrush, and Li Yu used a guitar, songwriting, and singing.
In terms of musical text, "Creation" is undoubtedly a rich and magnificent album, as well as an album with oil painting texture and strong contrast.
In terms of music, whether it is the alternative rock "Hot Sun Cambodia" or the electric rock "Fly", Li Yu's creation has always inherited his own folk song base characteristics. The tune is melodious, grounded but not tacky. Especially in the fusion of folk minor keys and independent music such as the tail note and transposition without PS traces, it is even more because of this seamless integration that the work appears to be completed in one go.
At the same time, the album "Creation" also has a musical vertical and horizontal width.
From the first album to the fourth album, Li Yu has always completed the production with Wang Yusheng, and the latter's aesthetic and control at the musical level also allows Li Yu's creative extension to always be in a state of thick accumulation and thin hair, and has a consistent musical direction.
However, the production combination of Li Yu and Wang Yusheng also evolved with the evolution of Li Yu's music. The pairing of electronic rock and opera aria in "The Twelve Elephants of the Wild Ridge" is both an arrangement idea and an extension based on the work itself. And the absurd rhythm and gongs and drums of "Legend of Drumming" are also synchronized with music.
Even in such a very folk work as "Wind and Rain Bridge", Wang Yusheng even integrated the rhythmic timbre elements of Trap in the second half of the arrangement, so that the music production broke through the traditional collocation combination, and according to the progress of the work, the growth was synchronized with music. As a result, timbre and rhythm are no longer bound by theory, and the arrangement and creation are more integrated, becoming an inseparable life complex.
Since Li Yu said that "Creation" is not an album that is easy to listen to, it is better to use the way of watching, reading, tasting and thinking, combined with traditional listening, to explore what kind of album this is.
Li Yu's music works for the fourth time, want to know the details, and listen to the album decomposition!