聲夢傳奇2 海外踢館賽上半場 回顧 丨 Stars Academy 2 Overseas Battle Part 1 + Finals TVB Review

Hi Everyone,

We are back with a new post for the Stars Academy 2 Overseas Battle Part 1 that aired on November 5th! We wanted to apologize first for not being able to get out a post to review the final episode of SA2 because we were incredibly busy those few weeks. We will share some of our general thoughts about it here before moving on to talk about the newest episode with overseas competitors from Malaysia and Australia.

Disclaimer: This post contains purely our opinions after watching the show. The information presented is done according to the best of our knowledge. We would like to apologize in advance for any errors or missing information.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Thoughts on Finals (Episode 15)

Here are our thoughts condensed. We were overall disappointed with the finals. We felt that the song choices were not the most suitable, and the performances did not wow us as we hoped. Pamela and XiX's performaces were similar to what they have done for most of the show. We wished XiX would have performed their slow song, so we could witness their acapella. Luckily, we will get to see that missed performance of《那些年》in part 2 of the overseas battle.

We thought Sabrina had the better performance of the night, when she finally showed off her piano skills and was back to her stable state that she showed us at the beginning when singing《說散就散》. It's too bad she did not progress to the next round because she had a very high score from the judges, but unfortunately, her audience votes were not enough. Luckily, she will also get to sing her planned song for the finals,《Roar》, next week. 

As for Janees, it seemed funny to us that she sang two Mandarin songs. We did not really appreciate the rearrangments for both songs because it didn't give Janees the opportunity to shine.《聽海》was a huge missed opportunity because we expected a dramatic buildup of emotion we have seen from other renditions, but it just didn't happen. We were hoping to see her choose a fast English song instead of《Bad Boy》which became messy with the rearrangement again. Having seen her strengths, we could easily picture her doing well with a pop or diva song from the likes of Jessie J, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, etc. We also noticed that students sometimes confuse fast songs as needing to dance, but that isn't the case at all as we've seen amazing high tempo performances just with passionate vocals and a bit of groove. Interestingly, Janees had the most audience votes for the night which meant that if one more of the 25 judges gave a green light for her in the last round, she could have won—so it was overall a very close match.

For Jasmine, we understand that she's marketable enough for TVB's standards, but maybe because Gigi set the standards pretty high for the champion last year, we kind of struggled to see the same "champion" symbol and aura radiating off her. Chantel might share somewhat similar of a market as Jasmine and despite getting 2nd place last year, she has still been given plenty of opportunites regardless. We think that Jasmine she still needs to improve her singing foundation and breathing because she sounded quite out of breath to us, especially for the fast song《瘋了》in the second round. As her strong suit is singing sad songs, her song list for the competition comprised of mostly male ballads. With her career is launching, we will have to see what kind of position she takes in the industry.

Overseas Battle Part 1 

Because TVB held SA compeitions in Malaysia and Australia, they invited the constestants and winners to their stage to perform. Star Team conists of Jasmine, Janees, Sabrina, XiX, Pamela, Angel, and Sean. Dream Team consists of Xair, Zev, Ziwei, Vincent, and Zentson from Malaysia, and Lorraine and Gina from Australia. They also invited 6 judges to watch the performances and then choose the team the perfromed better overall for the night. The judges were regulars at Stars Academy, including: 譚國政 (Davy Tam), 黃尚偉 (Conrad Wong),  張佳添 (Clayton Cheung), 陳潔靈 (Elisa Chan/Miss Chan Chan), 黃敬佩 (Peggie Wong), 舒文 (Schumann Lee). 

Song list based on order of appearance:

Janees, Gina《愛是永恆》

Angel, Archie 《紀念日》

Zentson, Aska 《刻在我心底的名字》

Lorraine 《Can't Take My Eyes Off You》

XiX 《在我生命裡》

Lorraine, Gina 《普通朋友》

Janees, Pamela《大會堂演奏廳》

Xair《囍帖街》

Jasmine《是但求其愛》

Gina's voice so far has not been too memorable for us, but it's a good try singing Cantonese which she does not speak. We hope to hear her sing a solo song in Mandarin to better see her strengths.

Angel and Archie played a convincing couple to deliver the song and was so sweet that Star and Dream Team were screaming and squealing the whole way through the performance. 

We commend Angel for trying another song style and Archie for being stable as always but also at ease enjoying the stage.

We remember Aska sang this song as his first competition song back in Season 1. However, we didn't see too much connection or chemistry between the two singers for this duet. Hopefully, Zentson will get another chance to sing next week.

This was one of our favourites of the night! Lorraine has a powerful voice and seemed to have fun while performing this classic song. We can see why she was the winner from Australia.With her confident stage presence, she really seems like a professional singer. Some audience even said she reminded them of the young Janice Vidal. We definitely would like to see her sing Dua Lipa as Clayton Cheung suggested.

They performed this song for the Roman Tam 20th Anniversary Anniversary Memorial Concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, so it seems like they didn't have time to prepare another song. That might be why their introductions of themselves at the beginning were still there and a bit awkward when they kept on promoting "XiX". They kept the professionalism and it did seem like they were performing for a concert instead of compeition. 

We agreed with the judges' comments for this duet that showcasing each of their unique voices would have helped make this performance stand our better. When Gina was singing, we couldn't hear Lorraine's voice much, but their harmonies were pleasant.

Another wonderful duet with well-designed harmonies from Janees and Pamela to follow their duet of 《 依然》. This time, Janees does a violin solo in the intro and music break. We saw someone in the comments explain that she played the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Franck Sonata. After waiting soo long for Janees to sing a Hacken Lee song with violin, we were not disappointed. We wished the sound mixing pushed up the violin sound more during the music because now it's kind of burried beneath the other instruments and Pam's voice. Learning from each other, Pam has continuously improved as well. You can now hear her sing with different tones to match the song. It's very encouraging to see that they can perform at this level when they are not even official singers yet. 

Xair has a sweet and clear voice, but she did seem a bit more nervous than when she performed in Malaysiam, which is understandable in a new environment. This song might not have been the best choice for her because of the dense Cantonese lyrics, and she tried very hard to pronounce all the characters right. We thought it was overall an acceptable performance. We agree with Miss Chan Chan's comments that if everyone sang in Mandarin instead, Star Team might not be able to win. We would like to see Xair sing and dance, since she mentioned it's what she enjoys doing.

This song's theme is quite mature and difficult to handle. We hope Jasmine can try to sing some younger themes next time. Eric and Hanjin also co-wrote a new song for her which was shown at the beginning of the episode, with a very acoustic and non-traditional Cantopop sound to it. It will be interesting to see if they will have a separate music video for the song, or if this version is the official one.

After 9 performances for the night, 4 judges voted for Star Team and 2 judges for Dream Team. Dream team is losing so far and has lost all the mini games in between too, so let's see if they are able to win aa few points back next week. We still think they will likely make the HK Star Team the overall winner, so it doesn't look bad.

 Aside from the competition, we saw a few of the vlogs Zentson, Zev, and Xair posted during their trip. They seem to be having a lot of fun trying out HK delicacies and visiting TVB's film sets and Ocean Park. Since they have already returned home, we hope they will get the chance to go to HK again and share some more of their singing. Next episode, Zev, Ziwei, Vincent, Sabrina, and Sean will continue the second part of the battle. Thanks for reading our review!

- CeeJay

Images Retrieved From:

http://img.tvb.com/mytvs/poster/1370/h_136939_v1_o.jpg

https://img.tvbaw.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ0dmJhdy1uYSIsImtleSI6ImltYWdlcy9iYW5uZXIvNDZmNmZkOTgtM2VlMy00ODMyLTgyZTItOWE4MTM0ZDYxMzRkLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6IHsiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifSB9fQ==

https://www.orientalsunday.hk/%e6%9c%80%e6%96%b0%e5%a8%9b%e8%81%9e/%e9%83%ad%e5%af%8c%e5%9f%8e-%e5%ae%a3%e5%b8%83%e5%86%8d%e5%81%9a%e7%88%b8%e7%88%b8-%e5%9f%8e%e5%ab%82%e9%99%80%e7%ac%ac%e4%ba%8c%e8%83%8e-332855/3/

References:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%81%B2%E5%A4%A2%E5%82%B3%E5%A5%872

https://www.youtube.com/c/%E8%81%B2%E5%A4%A2%E5%82%B3%E5%A5%87STARSACADEMY