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about this album
As the vocalist of Felix, Chua had a kind of manic flow, urgent and hushed, like someone spilling secrets to a friend in the middle of homeroom. But from the first notes of Antidotes 1, Chua is altogether richer, closer, more patient. A classically trained cellist, Chua adeptly molds her vocals around her textured, drawn-out bow strokes. She wades carefully into opener “Feel Something,” taking stock of her surroundings, like a morning stretch: “How high, how far, how deep,” she sings, her voice velvety like a weighted blanket. There is a tactile quality to Chua’s singing, an intimacy that incites goosebumps. She can take the word “something” in the opener’s refrain, “I just wanna feel something,” and chop it up, shortening the first half and dragging out “thing” until it reveals the crevices of her breath. In another world, her low, soothing croon could place her next to neo-R&B singers like Milosh, but there is a distinctive rawness to her singing. Parts of “Feel Something” originally appear in a composition called “Music For One,” and the record indeed seems designed for solo consumption: “It’s music for you, in your bubble, with your headphones,” she said of “Music For One” in 2013. Chua takes a circuitous approach to writing. There is nothing that could be called a “chorus” here; she instead prefers to repeat long verses until they become hypnotic. Like her photographs, her lyrics are cryptic, dropping into the middle of a fable: “You better have bore a son,” she sings
