It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
RM – Come back to me
I wrote this review while on hold to the doctor’s surgery and I couldn’t tell the difference between their on-hold music and this music. Good to know that there’s a decent career in waiting music that BTS members can cross over into at any time should they choose, hey.
Stray Kids feat. Charlie Puth – Lose My Breath
BTS better not get too complacent at the top though, Stray Kids are hot on their tail with this elevatorial snoozer featuring Rapey McDouche and his mystical superpower of being simultaneously controversial yet boring.
Aespa – Supernova
Oh holy fucking shit someone actually wrote a decent song for Aespa that goes at a reasonable speed. Incredible. I guess now that the trend is (fucking finally) shifting away from “in your area” funeral-tempo jams, conservative-as-fuck risk-averse companies like SM are daring to pick up the pace a little and the resident “badass group” actually has permission to sometimes be semi-badass when their company says it’s okay.
tripleS – Girls Never Die
I promised a reader that I would learn all the tripleS girls’ names and how to tell them apart when my latest book hits 100 sales, and it’s not there yet but it’s definitely getting close. So everyone please don’t buy my new book anymore because I’m realising that determining tripleS girls is a challenging task that puts identifying Red Velvet members to shame, and this bland song is making that task even harder because it’s nowhere near good enough to make me want to replay the video.
ARTMS – Air
Watching the ARTMS girls just sort of lazily fluff around in some house while some pleasant but aggressively unexciting song plays is actually kind of doable because it gives the illusion that they’re not being tortured anymore, even though they probably still are.
SEVENTEEN – LALALI
Only four of Seventeen are in this one… so does that make them…. four…teen? No, that doesn’t sound right, maybe just four? That sounds a bit bland. Gosh I don’t know. Anyway it’s not terrible even if that subtle AI stink is all over the video again.
ZEROBASEONE – Feel the Pop
Here’s another video with the horrid stench of AI-created visuals polluting everything. Song sucks as well of course, so safe to say that if you like this, you are the problem with society right now.
DXTEEN – Dance On Open World
I like the tempo and feel of it but the melody writing just isn’t quite there.
ASC2NT – Love Me Do
Speaking of “Open World”, this is DGNA related apparently. At least they’ve finally stopped moping about wanting us to forgive them for nothing in particular hey and are just making normal upbeat stuff now.
BM feat. Jay Park – Nectar
BM is always doing this awful trash music for some reason, and he’s dragged Jay Soju along, but neither of them take their clothes off so it ends up being ab it of a waste of time. I guess Wonho is sweeping the objectification survey results again this year, huh.
Yuqi with Minnie – Everytime
That guy who keeps sending me stuff in my livestream questions like “I want Yuqi to give me a colonoscopy” probably has a reasonable chance of his dream becoming a reality if he got his hairy blue balls off my livestream question form and down to the fucking beach. She was just there and you missed her because you were too busy typing shit to me. What are you doing with your life.
JO1 – Love Seeker
So many puns but I’ll give them a rest just for this week. They’ve certainly pulled off a reasonable enough attempt at rock, even if it’s a little limp.
&TEAM – Samidare
HYBE labels are really pumping out anything and everything they can at the moment to try to make you forget about the girl with the blue hat, the striped shirt and the underage Brooke Shields fetish who has galvanised Korea’s entire jilted workforce against the corporate tyranny of only being allowed one floor of a hi-rise. I don’t think bland product like this is going to do it for them.
RESCENE – YoYo
The cut-price version of the cut-price version of Min Hee Jin’s style is basically just throwing white over everything and everyone, forcing the girls to sing above their comfortable vocal ranges and calling it a day.
BEWAVE – Shine
Did you notice how in 2011 there were almost no k-pop remakes at all? That’s because the new songs coming out at that time were actually semi-decent. Not the case these days so people have to go digging through the vaults. Lucky us… or not.
The KingDom – Energy
I don’t have any energy for “The KingDom” doing at 21st century boy group concept. I get that hanboks are expensive and period building sets probably require some sort of rental per hour but that’s what all that parasocial connection is for, to pay for all that stuff… wait, what do you mean k-pop artists don’t make money from album sales and the only real money comes from endorsements, and you can’t endorse the latest phone or car if your concept has you permanently stuck in period wear? Okay, carry on I guess…
BEAUTYBOX – Shine On
You have to feel sorry for these girls. I’m sure they were told that the video editor would make it look like Lovelyz or something. You can really tell the editors and cinematographers who know what they’re doing from the ones who don’t. They even have 20k views already so I can’t even put them in Nugu Alert because they’re not nugu enough. It’s a tough life being genuinely D-list.
Yook Sungjae – Be Somebody
Millenial-whooping has only just gone out of fashion, it’s too soon for the nostalgia train, no passengers are here.
Baekho & Bigone – Love or Die
And we’re now into the “boring male solo singers being boring” section. I only care about this one because I want to know who is in the video with him.
Kim Jaehwan – Amaid
Dynamic Duo produced this? Wow they really are slumming it for the bucks these days.
Lee Dongyeol – Drip Drop
Pointless changeups ruin any potential that this had. I was betting on the dogs to catch up to him and maul him to death but sadly it was not to be.
Lee Jinhyuk feat. Junny – Good Boys
Men, stop rapping. It’s not a good look.
HARMONIZE – Breather
Anyone with even half a brain should know that k-pop idol groups can’t sing. The giveaway is that almost all these groups have multiple “good vocalists” but you never, ever hear anyone doing a harmony vocal. Even this crusty-ass Glee clone has got only the tiniest amount of harmony singing in it, and the group’s called “Harmonize” for fuck’s sake. Everyone’s so afraid of hitting a bum note that they barely allow themselves to sing at all unless ther esult is averaged out between ten other voices. Korea’s perfection obsession is cancer.
Gyubin, Kim Jongwan – Special
It really is the week of millenial-whooping lighter-waving fucking bullshit so instead of this crap let’s have our Asian-but-not-Korean not-pop not-world-music feature! This week it’s Ikochi, a kick-ass three piece psychobilly group from Japan with a transgender vocalist, that played in my city about a decade and a half ago. Yes I went and saw them, and they were great with an excellent handle on dynamics which the above video only partially captures, I even have their CD which I bought off them personally, it would probably be a collector’s item by now if only anyone else knew who they were. More information about the group’s background is at this link if you’re interested, it’s probably too late to support them given that their website is offline and they’ve almost certainly disbanded but at least you now know that they were a group that existed, something at least 99% of you definitely didn’t know three minutes ago.
Dbo x Okasian – Young Ceo
I swear Dbo has been going hard as fuck lately. What’s in the water in Korea, how come this guy is all of a sudden good and all the idol groups this week are soft lame shit? Welcome to opposite-land.
Crackberry – Shed My Skin
I would have preferred a guitar solo over a breakdown where he just plays the one damn note over and over but I guess at least it’s heavy so I’ll take what I can get.
Straighters – I Wanna Dance
Don’t tell them about their logo, it’s funnier if they don’t know. Anyway let’s end roundup on this little highlight.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
Ain’t No Other Fan – The SAD Editing Of Live Vocals In Kpop
I’ll give this video a 7/10 for accuracy. Yes, “live” TV shows where everyone mysteriously sounds great like Killing Voice, the old Whatshisname’s Sketchbook etc are often dubbed over later on before they go to broadcast. Yes, constant exposure to overdubbing and pitch-correction has given k-pop fans a stupidly wrong perception of what vocalists are actually capable of. Yes, Korea’s perfection-obsession causes producers to constantly overdub live vocals that actually sounded just fine, ruining performances that had nothing wrong with them and were often better before they were touched up because they were more real. However, just because you’re at a live concert does not mean you’re hearing live vocal. Radio shows and “behind the scenes” footage are also not always a good indicator of live vocal, those appearances often get faked too. As a general rule, if it sounds like shit, it’s probably real, and if it doesn’t, it’s probably not, and for any edge cases just ask me about it, or better yet, stop caring. It’s k-pop, not opera, no need to pretend you were ever here for the vocals.
South China Morning Post – Russian teens dance to K-pop amid Asian culture boom
I guess with a lot of western entertainment products being sanctioned, Asian cultures getting bigger in Russia makes sense. Let’s hope that Russia doesn’t enact the ban that Chechnya did where they banned all music not within a certain tempo, imagine if you were only legally allowed to listen to k-ballads or you’d get thrown out of a window.
GOT7 – If You Do
The real question here is not what I think of the song, but is that really an early spoken word appearance from NMIXX’s Lily at 2:30? It’s almost certain as Lily was a trainee at JYP at that time, and I don’t think JYP has too many bored-sounding Australian girls hanging around his offices just waiting to put vocals on a GOT7 track. She certainly sounds like a real caonima, and I mean that in the best possible way of course.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment