Mayday – Do You Ever Shine?

Crossover music is an interesting thing that isn’t an exact science. Some artist crossover to other regions with commercially successful careers quite smoothly, but leave a bittersweet hint when they “go to the other side” by changing themselves completely. Some others fail in the process and go back to where they came from.

The most common thing you’ll hear people say is that the artist sounds like “a watered” version of themselves, they don’t quite sound like they should to accommodate themselves to the other market and have stopped being true to who they are.

After having a successful career in their native Taiwan and doing pretty good in Mainland China [1], Mayday have started a bunch of activities in Japan that go beyond your regular Kpop single-dropping. The guys released Dancin’ Dancin’ [MV] — the Japanese version of their song Sad People Should Not Listen to Slow Songs (傷心的人別聽慢歌) — featuring TERU from GLAY alongside a Best Of compilation that also included a collaboration with flumpool [1].

Recently, their latest song is Do You Ever Shine? which can be spotted as the ending theme of this season’s Japanese drama Bitter Blood (ビター・ブラッド, aka. Partners by Blood) starring Atsuro Watabe and Rurouni Kenshin boytoy Takeru Sato.

Can’t get anymore Japanese promotion than that!

It’s striking how Mayday-esque their Japanese music still sounds. It doesn’t lose a single element from their regular music in Mandarin… maybe except for their command in lyrics, STILL- it is Takeshi Kobayashi.

I don’t know how far they will go, but I’m enjoying seeing them working at it.