Tim: You might remember Fear of Tigers from last year’s pretty good Revenge of the Tripods or earlier this year’s brilliant Sound of Arrows remix, both free giveaways; since then he’s lined up a number of tracks to release properly and as an album out in March, and this is the first of them.
Tim: “MORE CHRISTMAS! WE MUST HAVE MORE!” is pretty much what I thought when I saw the e-mail, but alas it turns out that the song has basically nothing to do with Christmas, or, in fact, Kaohsiung, a place in Taiwan. I asked him why the title, then, and apparently he spent the first half of his life there, and the song is a tribute to the city, where Christmas is celebrated as a festival of love. So isn’t that nice.
Tom: You’ve done proper journalism, Tim! I think you might get a badge or something.
Tim: Oh, thank you very much. I’ll write off to Blue Peter tomorrow. In the meantime, I really love this track (and I’d like it even more if it didn’t feature its misleading title).
Tom: Agreed: when the beat came in, I was pretty much entirely sold on the track — and then, just to make it even better, the chorus came along.
Tim: It’s really got pretty much everything you’d need in a decent ‘dreamwave’ (not my word, but it does sound good) track; the Taiwanese poem at the start probably isn’t for everyone, but it does serve to add a bit of the heartfeltness that might otherwise be lost if this were stuck in with a load of other synthpop, not that that deserves to happen. Because this is great: the chorus line, the ahh-ing at the end, the instrumental line, everything, really. Great.