YMMV / Vienna Teng

• Awesome Music:
  • Stray Italian Greyhound. Bonus points because it's inspired by Real Life.
  • Antebellum.
  • This is what happens when you give Vienna a song title and one hour with which to write.
  • City Hall
• Crowning Music of Heartwarming Lullaby for a Stormy Night. Also, City Hall. *sniff sniff*
  • Shasta has one of these as well.
  • Anna Rose too.
• Germans Love Vienna Teng: She has quite the following in Germany and the Netherlands.
• Harsher in Hindsight: City Hall, which was inspired by San Francisco's legalisation of gay marriage, has the line "And if they take it away again some day, this beautiful thing won't change". Bittersweet when when first released (in 2006), now after prop 8 it's hauntingly predictive.
  • But as of now, Prop 8 has been deemed unconstitutional. So it's back to being bittersweet.
• Nightmare Fuel: Pontchartrain is a song about the devastation after Hurricane Katrina. "Darling, Lake Pontchartrain is haunted, / Bones without names, photographs framed in reeds" is fairly typical of the song's lyrics, all set to a fairly disturbing melody.
  • The first line of the a capella song Passage is "I died in a car crash", sung against the background noise of a highway overpass.
  • Radio, about an imagined suicide bombing of San Francisco. If you listen closely to the background noise, you can hear whispers going on behind most of the music, understandable only just after the bridge as Triage codes and real casualty numbers being whispered by a breathless first responder.
    • Hell, all the lyrics. I mean, "backpack of shrapnel and wire"? Not to mention the way it's so calm sounding.
  • Hymn of Axciom - an AI/database engine singing about all that it can do - search, gather, extrapolate all of your personal information for advertising/marketing. And then is utterly confused as to why you're creeped out by it.
    Is that wrong?
    Isn’t this what you want?
    Amen.
• Paranoia Fuel: "The Hymn of Acxiom" is written from the point of view of a database, which exists in real life, that collects way more personal information than the average person would expect anyone to know about them, for advertising purposes. The increasingly computerized vocal effects fall somewhere in between comforting and creepy.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel:
  • "The Breaking Light", "Oh Mama No", "Goodnight New York", "Lullaby for a Stormy Night".
  • "The Hymn of Acxiom" would fall into this category if it weren't for the lyrics.
• Tear Jerker: Could almost be considered part of her signature style, given how many of her songs fall in this category.
  "My first instinct was super, super emo: really really kinda maudlin and depressing, that's where my brain goes first, so."