lewloh : Robots
Robots is the latest single from singer-songwriter Lewis Loh, recently rechristened lewloh, and formerly known as LEW. With his prior output ranking amongst the best works made by Singaporean singer-songwriters in recent memory (namely the gorgeous 2019’s Red Flags EP and his debut album, Lullacry), Robots unfortunately falls short of the lofty standards set by these previous releases. Sadly, it’s somewhat of a step back.
On Robots, lewloh tackles issues regarding upbringing and societal expectations through the lens of the traditional Asian family dynamic, with a stripped-down performance consisting of just his acoustic guitar and voice. The track excels in terms of its musicality. Its tastefully barebones production helps empower lewloh’s powerfully impassioned vocal performance, as the sparse, lush guitars that color the track help add to its emotional potency. On the sonic end, Robots uses its simplicity to its advantage, making for a comprehensively pleasant and satisfying listening experience.
When digging down to the track’s lyrics, however, a vast majority of its shortcomings and issues start to appear. Here, the minimal arrangements become a double-edged sword. While usually allowing songwriters to deliver devastatingly naked, emotional truths, lewloh’s words here don’t really shine light on any non-obvious truths whatsoever.
In fact, despite the earnestness and the raw emotional delivery of his lines, many of the lyrics come across as incredibly on the nose and self-indulgent. Although it can be argued that lewloh’s intention was to imbue the track with honesty and sincerity, Robots lacks the poetic allure (à la Charlie Lim) or any semblance of a compelling narrative (à la Sun Kil Moon) to help pull it off. The metaphor of having to “learn to be robots” is borderline cringey and has been done to death in the past – only getting worse with the track’s reference to having to be “lawyers and doctors/Businessmen with dollars”. It’s hackneyed Asian stereotype – without his usual emotional complexity or lush orchestrations, Robots largely falls short of its goal in being an enlightening inner portrait. With the light falling on the wrong details, it instead gives no further guidance forward nor astute observation – beyond pure navel-gazing.
Overall, Robots is a masterfully beautiful track in both its musicality and its production. Yet for one of Singapore's most promising young songwriters, Robot's cliched approach to storytelling regrettably weigh him down a fair bit this time. “We are actors with an Oscar”? Maybe try the Star Awards first.