Cardin – Se Mai Mai

It’s like club opera up in Cardin Nguyen’s new Se Mai Mai. He sure knows how to keep your ass bouncing while telling you his prosaic love stories from one episode to the next like Korean TV series.

Despite his elementary lyrics and rangeless vocals, Cardin makes me feel like I am a heartless bastard. He seems to weep on every track—the cover of Steve B.’s “Waiting for Your Love” in particular—begging for his lover to come back. As if we couldn’t tell through his male-less singing, he recruits his boys—Chosen One and Phong Le—to drop nursery rap verses on “Ngay Thang Troi Qua” to get his point across. The joint comes off like three hopeless fools who just got dogged by the same trick. Through his breathy delivery, Chosen confesses, “Then you [were] getting jealous because they said ‘I get around’ / but honestly baby I was working on my sounds.” The real reason she left his ass because his sound is wack, and let’s not getting into Phong Le’s laughable verse in Vietnamese.

Why being so unsympathetic on the hommies who try to make the ladies happy? Looking upon the positive side, at least Cardin pens his own shit, and he writes in Vietnamese too. I give him props for making a step further than Trish who still writes kiddie English pop tunes for Vietnamese boys and girls, but he’s 26 now (according to HisSpace), not 16. So step up your game, and be the ladies man, not the ladies bitch.