Norah Jones, the girl who sold you sex without revealing her skin, is back with her third studio album Not Too Late. If Come Away With Me, which sold eight million copies, was to get you to runaway with her and Feels Like Home, which reached two million copies within the first month, had you settled down in a trailer home, Not Too Late, which will release at the end of January 2007, is a break-up-to-make-up deal.

On the album opener accompanied by an acoustic guitar ostinato, Jones wishes she could walk into a place you and her used to go, but she couldn’t without you. The memories are too strong, as she recounts in “Be My Somebody”: “I held your head up, do you remember? / When you wanted to make a blanket out of me / Oh I can’t lie… I been keeping score / And it’s your turn to wring me out / And lay me down to dry.” Yes, she’s mindfucking you again, and she’s damn good at it. She even invites you back to her jazzy “Little Room” that is big enough for you to do the things you like to do, and sings you a bluesy “Rosie’s Lullaby” if you are not in the mood to do anything. Can’t beat that, and it is still “Not Too Late,” to come home to mama, baby. She still wants you back because without each other, you both are going to be “Sinkin’ Soon” (a marvelous jazz arrangement with a kick-ass trombone break). So help her breathes and help her believes that you are “Not Her Friend” because she can’t pretend that you are. She can’t seem to stop “Thinking About You,” your cold hand, your broken voice, your twisted smile, and she knows exactly what you need to wash away your pain and to mend your “Broken” heart.

Talking about the art of album crafting. Jones and her musicians have mastered it by aiming straight at our soul from song to song, but in an easygoing route. Sex is presence (“Last night was a record to be broken / It broke all over the kitchen floor / Oh no don’t you go / I’m coming back with a rag / to wipe away the haze from the days / We’ve forgotten all about”) but never in your face. Affection is there but not over dramatic, thanks to that gruff voice, which sounds like a concoction of wild honey and cognac. Not Too Late will continue to dominate the pop chart and sellout like cocaine hits the street similar to its predecessors.

For a retrospective, Thanh Lam recovers eighteen selected tunes that are closed to her heart as well as her listeners’. The double-disc Giot… Lam shows that her singing has became more and more dramatic over the years. With the excessive use of vibrato, she delivers each song as if she’s about to burst into flame, but the musical productions appear to have ran out of propane. Nevertheless, the collection has its share of scintillating moments.

My patience is running out on Tung Duong. After his luminous Chay Tron debuted, he’s on the hideout for real. With the title track and “Trang Khat,” he got me so excited about the Vietnamese jazz scene. His thick, soulful voice combined with his potential to scat like a trumpet gave me so much hope, but he has nothing to follow up with for more than two years. Don’t sleep on me, man.

Since I already gave this album my 2 cents, let’s look at it in a different perspective—the art of crafting an album. As much as I adore the little iPod Shuffle, I gave it to my sister who could use it for exercise routine because I am not the type that listen to all the hits or only my favorites. I like to spend time with an entire CD, especially with hip-hop joints, to get a complete experience of what the artist is trying to communicate. Most of the time, Vietnamese singers just throw in a bunch of songs together to make an album. Rarely do they think about how an album should start or end, but Chay Tron is not the case. I am not sure if Le Minh Son did it consciously or unconsciously, but the songs fall together so perfect that the sequence created an epic. In the course of endless listening, I have noted some fluff on how the album is like a little fancy tale. It could be just my own imagination, but what the heck. Imagination is all I have, and it has been running pretty wild lately. So read on at my own peril.

Yeu

He’s wandering by himself searching for her in his dream. She is untouchable.

Chay Tron

He’s reminiscing the good old days when they still played hide and seek. She was his first sweet love.

Trang Khuyet

But the painful part comes when he reflects on their quarrels. Mad at him, she threw the moon back to the sky.

Lua Mat Em

When she was mad, he could see the fire in her eyes. She was burning like hell.

Trang Khat

Although he could see the flame in her complexions, she was still as beautiful as the moon and river.

Den Ben Anh Diu Dang

And when she came to him, she brought him joy and happiness.

Oi Que Toi

Who is she? It turns out that he’s referring to her as his homeland all these time.

After she did such a wonderful job with Ngoc Ha’s Nuoc Mat Mua Thu, I challenged her to take on Y Lan’s Hoi Tinh. As a chemical engineer who writes instructions on how to operate pharmaceutical equipments, could she move beyond her dried, mechanical style into something creative and erotic? To my surprise, she did not only nailed the translation, but also makes it more sensual than my original intention with her good use of Vietnamese.

Ý Lan là một trong những người đàn bà không muốn trưởng thành. Cũng chẳng tội tình gì, tuy cũng có lúc cô cũng đáng bị đét cho vài cái bởi cái tính ỏng ẹo như đứa con gái mới lớn, khi mà cô đã bước qua cái tuổi 50. Làm sao thay đổi bây giờ, bởi chính cô cũng thừa nhận đó là cái tính bẩm sinh của mình. Cô là một người đàn bà sở hửu một trái tim non dại, một tâm hồn trẻ trung và tràn đầy dục cảm.

Khi mới nghe qua đĩa nhạc Hỏi Tình mới nhất của Ý Lan, tôi lấy làm khó hiểu không biết cái dụng ý của cô là gì. Nhạc truyền thống, nhạc jazz, tình ca, và cả liên khúc hổn độn. Nhưng sau khi nghe lại một vài lần, tôi chợt hiểu thì ra đây là một động tình chứa đầy sự cám dỗ. Cô mời gọi tình yêu với “Hỏi Tình” để rồi van xin tình yêu đến với mình trong khi cô “Còn chất chứa tình yêu một thời để rồi nghe tàn phai / Bóng anh xa dần mãi còn lại tôi giữa cơn đau này” (“Còn Nghe Tiếng Gọi”). Trong “Anh Là Tất Cả,” cô thao thức trông chờ ban mai đến để được đến với tình vì chỉ có tình mới xoa tan mọi lo lắng phiền muộn trong cô. “Thôi thì… thôi thì… như thế cũng xong / Bao năm… bao năm chăn gối trông hòng gì đâu? / Đắng cay hờn tủi đã nhiều / Lệ tuôn như đổ trăm chiều khô đâu.” Cũng dể hiểu thôi, ở cùng lứa tuổi với cô có bao nhiêu người đàn ông có thể chìu chuộng cô như thời còn trai trẻ. Cô cần một gã thanh niên cường tráng để có thể song hành với cô trong cơn thác loạn (“Đêm Thấy Ta Là Thác Đổ”). Tiếng rên rỉ trong “Áo Lụa Hà Đông” như để khoấy động lòng người. Và như thể là chưa đủ, cô buông lời trêu gẹo lúc “Khỏa Thân Đêm,” để làm cho ta thêm thèm khát.

Có thể không ưa cái ỏng ẻo của Ý Lan, nhưng phải nói cái tính này đôi lúc cũng làm cho con người ta thèm ước. Không nên nghe dĩa nhạc này nêu như ta là kẻ ngoan đạo bởi nó sẽ đẩy ta vào con đường tội lỗi. Đó là trái với lời dạy của Chúa.

After posting Pham Duy’s juicy “Thien Duyen Tinh Mong,” a reader sent me something even better—an album of Pham Duy dedicated to provocative sex entitled Nhuc Tinh Ca. Before each song begins, Pham Duy gives us a brief introduction of the erotic content. The track that grabbed my attention is a Japanese-translated “Nguoi Tinh Ben Goi.” Through her small, dark and slightly scratchy vocals, Luu Hong makes luscious love to Pham Duy’s lustful lyrics. In the song, Pham Duy describes his lover as an angel with a broken wing who came and begged him for some love. Just imagine fucking an angel and making, “Nang me mang, nang dam dui, nang choi voi, thoat len loi an can.” If screwing an angel is a sin, send me straight to hell for it.

Many have castigated Pham Duy for being too filthy for his age, but I am right behind him. I don’t see any Vietnamese songwriter pushes the boundary the way he does. In “Nguoi Tinh Trong Canh Tay,” he uses his own “vulgar” voice to express all the passionate details of holding a lover in his arms. All I can say is that Pham Duy is like Hugh Hefner in Vietnamese music. Keep the spirit alive, pops!

Founded Visualgui.com while searching for Thanh Lam, Tri Minh—the son of Thuan Yen and the imaginative arranger behind Thanh Lam’s Tu Su—introduces me to some of his experimental work.

After listening to his arrangements, I must say that this guy has an ear for electronic music, and he knows how to weave the western sound into Vietnamese traditional styles. His remixes of “Chuon Chuon Ot,” “Tan Co Dao Duyen Fucked Up,” and “Ai Oi” are so damn fresh and exotic. From the vocal distortion to the organic-sounding effects to the space-trance vibe, Tri Minh’s artistic vision is ahead of the Vietnamese music scene.

Stood out most for me, however, is the hypnotic electronic bass line in his “Free Jazz” fusion. I asked him, “Why don’t you play improvising jazz?” He replied, “I used to play jazz but I think to some extend, Jazz is quite limited so I shift to electronic music where I found it is quite interesting and give me endless possibilities, and also, making a band in Vietnam is quite difficult.” Too bad that he passed on jazz. With his talent, he could pick up where Miles Davis left off and give Vietnamese music something to look into. Still, I am having my eyes set for his album coming this March.

You could experience the tunes I listed in my Dope Jam station.

I was requested to give my feedback on Ky Tran’s music back before Christmas break, but didn’t get a chance to get to it until now. My bad.

As stated on his site, Ky Tran is an amateur songwriter, and it shows through his work. In “Sexy Ladies,” a mid-tempo r&b pop, he wastes no time getting straight to the point: “Anh dang lang thang trong dem tim ve em / Da biet truoc em mong anh den [noi] (can’t make out the word, gotta pronounce the word clearly, bro) / Va lam tinh that nong nang voi em.” All he needs to do is sampling in 2pac’s “… screaming like you’re dying every time I am fucking you” and we have a real booty-breaking tune. Instead, his emphasis on “cung nhau ta di vao tinh ai…” gives me goose bumps. Don’t mind his slight raspy vocals, but the over float of honey is too much to handle.

I am not big on saccharine, trendy pop, but “Tinh Anh Chi Co Em” sure is catchy. If the tune is in Ung Hoang Phuc’s hand, I am sure he could get all the teenage chicks to sing along. Still, I have to give props to any Vietnamese youngster who writes and produces his own song. But you, my comrade, need to dig deeper into the dark corner where other Vietnamese musicians have not been to before. Push the limit. Be provocative, be controversial, and be heard. Make yourself stand out by being yourself.

When Thai Hien sings about being dead, the ethereal beauty of her voice combined with the eeriness of Duy Cuong’s imaginative scores will send bone-crushing chills to your spine. Like an image of moth-eaten body in “Dung Bo Em Mot Minh” (“…cung mot lu con trung ria ruc than hinh”) or an angelic spirit searching for her lover in “Yeu Tinh Tinh Nu,” Mau Thoi Gian is an album that featured some of Pham Duy’s mad wicked necrophilic ballads.

Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word” is a fine tune, but I find it a bit soft and saccharine, especially when the gay man himself sings it. The song has been widely covered, even within the Vietnamese community, but no one brings it up a notch the way Nguyen Khang does. His English is imperfect, but his flow is so unique that he has given me a different view about the song. When he kicks off the first verse, the roughness in his voice changes the song’s entire perspective. It is no longer a man crooning to a woman or, in John’s situation, a man to man, but a thug pouring his heart out to his love: “What have I got to do to make you love me / What have I got to do to make you care / What do I do when lightning strikes me / And I wake to find that you’re not there.” So when a thug apologizes, sorry has to be the hardest word. He was able to convey that vibe, but the other two guys who featured on the track fucking sabotaged it. Nguyen Khuong’s bitch-ass vocals works against the toughness Khang built, and Tien Dung’s weak-ass voice plus the computer manipulation ruined the song.

Damn Khang, you have to re-record this tune by yourself. You owe me this track, man!

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.