It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
Lisa – Rockstar
Lots of “star” but precious little “rock” in this track, which has a pretty fast-moving beat but not a lot else to get into. I don’t hate it but I also won’t remember how it goes in a week.
Jimin feat. Loco – Smeraldo Garden Marching Band
Is Jimin trying to invoke Sgt Pepper somehow with the visuals but trying to do it with lame tossed-off R&B lite instead of actual rock music? Pathetic. For the record I don’t hate all R&B, just the shitty limp versions your bias makes.
Chuu – Strawberry Rush
That’s it. K-pop is over. It’s a done deal. Chuu won. Everyone else, you won’t beat this, you can go make some other music now.
Chuu – Honeybee
But hey k-pop songwriters, just to make you feel better about yourself, Chuu also released this fairly average bossanova-flavoured thing just to show that even she is fallible and that you can keep up. There, doesn’t that feel better? The lengths Chuu will go to just to look after her fans’ mental health, what an angel.
STAYC – Cheeky Icy Thang
It’s almost the song of the year, but the topline writers and the riff writers were absolutely not on the same page and the result is (if you understand music theory) weird semitonal clashes between the normal thirds, sixths and sevenths in the melody verses the flattened versions in the chords and bassline, or (if you don’t, like every other k-pop writer) a weird uncomfortable feeling where it just doesn’t gel for some reason or other.
KISS OF LIFE – Sticky
Cignature do a video that’s sexy and has kind of revealing clothing: “oooh, exploitation, very bad, save Jeewon”. Kiss Of Life do a video that’s sexy and has kind of revealing clothing: “yass queens female empowerment cleaned the plate”. Why the double standard? Because the “concern” about Jeewon is mostly just bullying in disguise, but since Kiss Of Life aren’t designated bullying targets like Jeewon is, they escape unscathed, even though the product is similar. It doesn’t matter how many boobs posts I write, garden-variety Internet-dwelling k-pop fans are the real misogynists. Talk about the song? NEVER when your hypocrisy is so much more interesting.
BABY MONSTER – Forever
It’s the Temu version of IVE’s “I Am” that nobody asked for, with beats straight outta Xinjiang subjected to more change-ups than a baby thrust onstage at an NMIXX concert. Overall it’s actually not too bad but nobody who has heard the real thing is going to settle for this dropshipped version.
IVE – Summer Festa
The simplicity of this song harks back to the days when Bravesound was on top of the k-pop heap, even if the tune isn’t quite at that level.
KATSEYE – Debut
Have ANY of these “global girl groups” done anything but attract total disinterest? People need to get the memo that the reason why people like k-pop is because it’s… k-pop. Crazy, I know. Anyway I’m not sure if this shit is even eligible to be here but it’s on HYBE and they deserve to be punished for releasing this crap so here’s your token negative review I guess. [insert comments about sacrificing Gfriend for this here]
Alexa – Distraction
Alexa’s songs have been improving lately, to the point where it’s becoming possible to support her out of more reasons than just pity, and that she’s attractive and charismatic (which I will keep mentioning about everyone who I find attractive and charismatic just to annoy people who deserve to be annoyed). Also, the way the middle finger is censored right at the end, with the pixelation very precisely over just the middle finger and nothing else, indicates that the video director is very cultured.
CRAXY – Stupidz
Okay so the chorus is shit really, but the beats are great and honestly for a song like this which is mainly just shouting anyway, that’s kind of enough.
Kwon Eunbi – Unnatural
Just letting you know that Waterbomb in Seoul is on this weekend. That is all.
NCT WISH – Songbird
This song made me fondly remember those bubble-like Apple computers that probably sucked (idek I wasn’t rich enough to own an Apple) but they looked kind of cool and totally unlike the bland boring iShits of today.
UKISS – Stay With Me
UKISS putting in work with the boobs-harnesses, that’s what’s important in life.
UKISS – Man Man Ha Ni (2024 Ver.)
An old U-KISS song that was completely ruined by Autotune overuse back in the day, this new version is significantly better just for that one omission alone. Sometimes less is more… actually a lot of the time. Unless we’re talking about U-KISS member’s gym gains of course.
B.D.U – My One
Actually really quite good. This is about as good as white-shirt-wearing boy pop gets, folks.
FTISLAND – Burn It
Did you know that according to their Wiki, FTIsland was the first “idol rock” band, and that they “paved the way”? Just putting that out there. Anyway, this song is pretty average.
Jay Park – McNasty
How long has it been since Jay Park has been on a track as something other than a guest? He’s unfortunately not serving up soju to my girlfriend here but the song is appropriately sleazy and it has twerking jelly babies or whatever which I think is a win for representation or something.
BLINGONE – Kiss & Call
Trufax from my song submitter: this is apparently the “first-ever Peruvian kpop girl group, their agency wants to create a kpop group for each country”. Well hey if it’s good enough for whatever shit country you live in, it’s good enough for Peru. The song’s not much chop but it’s no worse than what Jimin put out this week.
ATEEZ – Empty Box
Accurate song title of the week, as it sure sounds like a box of nothing.
EPIK HIGH – K-DRAMA
Epik High’s Gang Starr impression is spot-on, pity that here they’re copying the weak end-of-the-album Gang Starr ballad that was your cue to flip the tape over and play it from the start again where all the bangers were.
Kim Jaejoong – Glorious Day
Don’t tell me millennial whooping is coming back.
Nam Woohyun – Sunshine
Very boring, but I suppose young actors and actresses in Korea need work.
Rocky – Jealousy
These male ex-group members either have boring-as-shit ballads, millennial-whooping-cough, or they want to be Taemin. There’s no in-between.
Gyubin – Satellite
The millennial whoops are coming in hard here too. I don’t give a crap about this song but why not play this to your mum, she’ll love it.
Peggy Gou – Lobster Telephon
The song submitter wrote here “she’s a korean dj under a british label, idk if it’s eligible, the song is entirely in korean” and my knee-jerk reaction here was “yeah you’re probably right – deleted!” But then I thought about it: maybe because she’s from a completely different music scene far removed from idol pop, the song might actually be alright? Okay it wasn’t, but the New Order style beats were good.
Moon – Shoot
It’s not a bad effort and has some decent pace to it, but I think that sample Britney Spears uses in “Toxic” has kind of been claimed by her in popular culture now and it sounds funny whenever someone else uses it. It’s a bit like if a rapper used the siren from “Night Of The Living Baseheads” on a beat – it’s not really plagiarism to sample something that’s obviously a sample of its own (and uncredited back in the day too no doubt) but it still feels weird to grab something so iconic and strongly associated with just one thing in popular music that isn’t you.
Moon – Ridah
I thought she was going to set fire to the Paradise Diner there at the start. She’d be the hero of all k-pop fans worldwide if she did that! Maybe next time.
BÉBE YANA & Closet Yi – BT14U
Some club thing that just kind of disappears into the background. I’m sure it makes sense on E’s at 4am.
Jueun – Stay
Just a PSA that the DIA girls are all still alive and doing stuff.
Today’s Special, Oyeon – Bean Noodle
To make this type of song work you need absolutely killer melodies and we don’t quite have them here, but it’s a good try. Let’s support them because they might get it right in the future, like Yukika did on that one really good track of hers buried amongst all her other songs that suck.
Summer Sweater – Summer Vacation
It’s the middle of winter and fucking cold here right now so I’m not in the mood for this summery summer shit, so let’s have our non-Korean non-pop non-world-music feature instead! And no it’s not whatshisname Beaver that everyone keeps suggesting because honestly what’s the fucking point of featuring something you all already like, this feature isn’t about validation, it’s about discovering new cool shit. So let’s discover Melt Banana, who are better than your j-rock bias.
The Solutions – N/A
This is okay but when you couldn’t be bothered naming your own song, why would we be bothered listening to it?
The Volunteers – L
This dull ballad sure is an L.
Northfacegawd feat. J-Tong – Save the green planet
Everyone talks about how if you stopped crypto and NFTs and AI you’d save a small country’s worth of carbon emissions, and I’m sure that’s true and as good a reason to oppose those things as any other, but nobody talks about the effect of rap music on the planet. Just stop rapping and keep cleaning the beach, kids.
2DaYellow, Meeruu – gOutside
Yes I think I’ll go outside and end roundup right here, great suggestion.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
woo – Ranking the worst k-pop fandoms in a tier list
I thought this was a pretty good video, of course the video creator has to put whopping great disclaimers everywhere on the thing so he doesn’t get mobbed and his life destroyed by the crazy psychotic doxxing cyberbullying deranged hive-minded humourless fuckwits that is every deep-down-the-rabbit-hole k-pop fan ever. I should do some tier list videos or streams or something, I think that would be good, if you have any and you’d like to see me throw down on a specific list then link me, it could be a fun activity. For what it’s worth I’d put every single fandom here in the gutter tier because they all do the fucking same shit, I’ve offended enough different fandoms to know.
IVE Tries Popular American Foods
Your one-way ticket to awkwardness is here as IVE do crazy things like pick at the inside of a hamburger with a fork to avoid the carbs. In completely gosh it’s so unrelated news “The Love Complete”, the fourth and final book of the Shin Hana series is about 75% done and now that the computer game is finished I should be able to get the rest of the book done quite quickly. No idea why I’m mentioning that here, certainly not for sales because I really am not looking forward to trying to learn how to identify all of the TripleS girls.
Hyomin – Nice Body
Hyomin worked herself into peak physical fitness and then released this ragebait song just to piss off her ugly haters and it definitely worked, with a lot of them complaining that the song’s message was anti-feminism or something but they were just too shallow to understand the song’s true body-positivity message. Sucks to be them. Nari wouldn’t need this explained to her, and neither would Kerrigan May, or any of my readers waiting for Wonho to return from military service.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment