![[Album Review] Crowd Lu 盧廣仲 – HeartBreakFast 傷心早餐店](https://asianpopweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-630x540.png)
| Album Information |
| Album Name: HeartBreakFast 傷心早餐店 |
| Release Date: 17th September 2025 |
| Music Video Archive |
| 一夜一夜一夜 Sleepless Night 以後 After Us 輕輕對你說 Whisper 我只怪我自己 Love Lost lost you twice 太陽與地球 Sun & Earth 愚人節快樂 All Fool’s Day 死在你的胸懷 Aaaaahhhhh 一個人睡著 Farewell Love Song 不要在一起 Match Point |
Album Review
By Denis Tse
Jazz brushes, muted crooning, and chromatic chords – these are the sonic trademarks of Crowd Lu’s latest all-covers, all-ballads album, HeartBreakFast 傷心早餐店. Lu, one of Taiwan’s most influential and prolific singer-songwriters since his 2008 debut, has taken a big creative risk here in only recording demos by other songwriters. “The Chinese music scene still has many hidden gems,“ he tells The News Lens, and described finding these works amidst the vast sea of songs as ”a kind of yuanfen (fate), even a form of quantum entanglement.”
In practice, Lu worked meticulously to research and curate the ten album tracks – in order to prepare for this project, Lu and his team listened to over ten thousand demos by independent musicians, and even launched an online campaign for recommendations, before selecting ten songs “spanning the spectrum of heartbreak”. Conceptually, Lu takes on the persona of a Bartender for the Broken-Hearted in this album, using the ballad as base spirits for his soothing offerings. While this is a fun gimmick, the album pales in comparison to the artist’s usual songwriting standard, which is more a testament to Lu’s singular genius than anything, really – I like to think of Lu as Mandopop’s Stevie Wonder, in that both write jazz/blues-influenced pop music that shouldn’t be as catchy as they are.
At its best, the album shows you a new side of Lu, without his acoustic guitar, but also without his songwriting brilliance – almost as if you’re at his concert at Blue Note, where he’s singing jazz standards and backed by an acoustic trio (Dawson Chien on bass, Charles Chang on piano, and Fin Huang on drums). The musicians are recorded playing together live, which gives the tracks a lightness to balance out the album’s melodrama, as well as space for subtle, playful improvisation. The album highlight, “lost you twice”, is also its most minimalist, with just vocals and piano, and a melody that delights in its twists and turns. On the track, Chang’s piano flourishes accompany Lu’s fluttery vocals well, with chunky chords and dynamic playing making up for the lack of bass and percussion. The climax is typical Lu – wistfully belting hip riffs over chord changes, before nesting at his evocative, tension-resolving falsetto.
While Lu has always been a confident singer, he allows his voice to be the solo instrument for the first time here, cutting out the original track’s lo-fi hip hop production, as well as his usual full-band sound, to focus on interpreting another person’s song. In other words, the cover album gives Lu an excuse to just sing, for once – and he does a great job, though it’s not something we haven’t already heard from his creative output. In that regard, this album will appeal to his fans who get to hear Lu’s vocals front and center, but may not register as interestingly to newcomers.
The sixth and seventh tracks, “Sun & Earth 太陽與地球” and “All Fool’s Day 愚人節快樂”, are inspired takes on heart-wrenching love songs, with the woodwinds on “愚人節快樂” being a fun highlight, while the tracks “Aaaaahhhhh 死在你的胸懷” and “Match Point 不要在一起”, are folksy, gently head-nodding tunes that would fit well in Lu’s discography.
On the track “Whisper 輕輕對你說”, Lu turns an acoustic ballad into a grungy, mid-tempo groove powered by a snakey bass riff and lead vocals paired with a second vocal part one octave lower. The other half of ballads, including the focus track “Sleepless Night 一夜一夜一夜” however, sound generic: melody-heavy, formulaic chords, underdeveloped instrumentation and arrangements, which lead to builds and modulations that feel trite.
Lu’s experimentation on this album is still worthy of an attentive listen, if not for spotlighting lesser-known songwriters, then for the strength of his vocal performances and stylish take on the most enduring of Mandopop genres – the ballad. In fact, many of Lu’s contemporaries have also attempted cover albums, including Joanna Wang’s The Things We Do For Love (2009), Khalil Fong’s Timeless (2009), and Yoga Lin’s Jazz Channel (2013). But most similar in sound and concept is Jam Hsiao’s Reminiscence (2015), where he picked ten classic Mandopop ballads from the 80s and 90s, and recorded the tracks with a live orchestra in one-takes.
It’s hard to pull off a cover album, partly because we are already so familiar with the source material; by only picking songs that are relatively unknown, Lu manages to avoid this common pitfall. But without Lu’s songwriting and blending of blues, funk and Taiwan campus folk song (on works like “我愛你” and his What a folk!!!!! album), HeartBreakFast doesn’t reach the heights of his usual output.
Rating: 3.5/5
Album Track List
