“Only through the winter of Hideaway can we taste the spring of Blooms.”
After a solid string of single releases, Singapore singer-songwriter Jean Tan finally releases her anticipated 5-song EP Blooms, available on 20 November 2020 on all major digital streaming platforms via Leeway. This EP includes singles released this year, such as “Serenade” and “Oak Cherry Wine”, as well as two new renditions of old songs as fitting bookends, “Everything I Love” and “All Things New (Blooms)”.
Although she has dabbled in folktronica and darker instrumentation in her previous Hideaway EP, Blooms brings Jean’s vocals center stage, showcasing both sensibility and range of expression. Jean’s voice is sweet with a touch of smoke, complimenting the bluesy guitar lines and soft pulse of the electric piano peppered throughout the tracklist.
The opening track, “Everything I Love”, prefaces the EP wonderfully with its sheer lightness. Although inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips”, the floral imagery does not seek to despair as it did in the original text but instead, reminds us that the withering is a sign of a bed of blooms to come. Taken in context of Jean’s last EP Hideaway, which was written in a 7-year period of battling illness, Blooms rings in resounding assurance that for every time of darkness and death, follows a time of light and rebirth. charts us through the noonday sun and its open sky in “Fly”, and brings us on a drowsy, love-soaked song and dance in “Oak Cherry Wine”. Only through the winter of Hideaway can we taste the spring of Blooms.
Listening to the Blooms EP from start to finish reminds one of Jean’s best-performing singles yet – “Colours” – written for the 2015 Southeast Asian Games.
The extended play also sees Jean collaborating with other well-known local artists, such as Adam Shah (“Serenade”), Euntaek Kim (“Fly”), Ben Poh (“Fly”), Leo Goh (“Oak Cherry Wine”), and Trinh Ha Linh (“All Things New (Blooms)”). “Everything I Love” and “All Things New (Blooms)” were also recorded by Leonard Soosay.
