Korean ten-piece boy band, and yes, they have a fat member! Albeit not pictured.
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Anthony Easton: A cross-pollination of rock and roll, dance and hyper pop, with those amazing starts and stops, the laughs, the manic, slightly mangled lyrics, the bass, oh Jesus the bass. Where have you been all my life, Super Junior?
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Dear god, this is the sound to match those fawning Nadia Oh descriptors. Its sparkling noise is precise as train wheels, and its guys have mutated into swanky androids but remember just where their voices sound like pistons and which is the proper cadence of “baby” in a boy-band song. There is a beat, and the way the rhythms and syllables stomp it into the foreground can reasonably be called “swag.” You’ve all been listening to Super Junior by mistake! This explains everything.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Korean culture certainly isn’t losing its hotness across the rest of Asia, but if you’re going to take on Japan, taking your best song and singing it again in Japanese is as fine a way of cracking your neighbour’s hearts and charts as there could be. “Bijin” is an absolute monster. There’s something tribal in the drums and the flat, rhythmic mantras of the chorus, and there’s propulsive synths, grabs of English, laughter and an irresistible dance floor pull. But the words might be the most percussive element. They bounce and make me want to do the same.
[9]
Ian Mathers: One of my favourite things about the Jukebox is the way that it serves as a continual corrective for my hopelessly North American-centered view of the pop world. Korea has a boy band with a dozen members! Which makes songs with choruses better than almost all of our boy bands. Thanks to a misspent youth I can’t quite help thinking of about 80% of the Asian pop songs I hear as theme songs from anime series, and this one would definitely involve giant robots. How do you make a two-part chorus that’s both this soaring and this terrifyingly, rigidly stomping unless you want to contrast high-school romance with city-levelling mech battles?
[7]
Frank Kogan: Light boy-band R&B refashioned for modern glistening-steel electrodance, with adventure in the music as the voices run around like tiny darts dodging ball bearings. Suffers from a few drawbacks: (1) Super Junior did this so much better on “Stepping Stone” “Sorry Sorry” a couple years ago. (2) Even then, their voices were too light to give the thing quite enough passion, and several months later little IU, alone on the talk shows with her acoustic guitar, cleaned their clock. (3) The singing sounds even less substantial in Japanese. (4) Prior to the steel, they did a track that was sweetly right and light and that I’d say I miss deeply except I just discovered it on YouTube yesterday. Were there a bit more sizzle in the harmonies here, I’d be enthralled.
[6]
Michaela Drapes: There’s too many strange things going on here for me to be really excited about this, starting with the too-predictable faux-reggaeton clubby beat propped up with what sounds like synth kodo drums. Then there’s the issue that this just loses something in translation, and I don’t even know Korean or Japanese. That charming, wonderful K-pop sound is really diluted here. I’m sure some serious thought went into marketing Junior Senior Super Junior specifically to Japan, and I’m sure it will be a wildly successful venture. But from way, way, way outside looking in? It’s a disappointment.
[3]
Alex Ostroff: I’ll fully admit to being a K-pop dilettante. I haven’t delved into K-pop in any comprehensive or structured way, just surfed through an endless black hole of YouTube videos after Frank introduced us to After School’s delightful Bang! last year. However, I get the sense that female K-pop groups get more experimental, interesting and fun music. The boys I’ve seen get interesting visuals sometimes — G Dragon’s Heartbreaker music video is wonderfully androgynous and shiny and stylised — but rarely get tunes that sound much different from run-of-the-mill North American pop music. Super Junior are notable more for their super-boyband structure than any musical innovation; this fits right in with dance music in the Year of Planet Pit. Thus, the proper grading metric is the Boy Band Evaluation Equation, to which *NSYNC and their ilk were subjected to back in the day: what percentage of those singing lead vocals would I fuck?
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Fuck, I don’t know. Korean Black Eyed Peas? It has will.i.am’s android commitment to fun that it’s willing to impose by force, though I never get the sense this particular robo-industrial complex is anything but benign. I suspect the Japanese is no more substantial than the interstitial English parts, but that’s OK, because the most important moment of this tune is the bit where the Auto-Tune piles up against the stomping beat and disintegrates the thing into a stuttering aishiterutterutteるってるってるってゝゝ♬〜。.
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