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[6.00]
Frank Kogan: “Maybe this time disco really does suck,” says Chuck, referring to the current r&b-pop-dance amalgam that’s atop the American charts. One of the reasons it emphatically doesn’t suck in Korea is that the Korean r&b-pop-dance amalgam sounds a lot like actual disco and like big chunks of the way the ’80s turned disco into bouncy dance-funk and freestyle, not as throwbacks but as mundane living parts of the musical language. So when you don’t want to go for hard beats or a tough demeanor, Korea gives you a better palette to choose from. Last time up, on “Jumping,” Kara used massive Miami Sound riffs, compacted into great richness and poured on us like waterfalls and gulf-streams. This time, it’s jaunty hi-NRG, shot through with thickeners and poured all over us again.
[7]
Iain Mew: This brings back memories of Steps and S Club and a variety of other bright and shiny UK pop from a decade ago. I think it’s mostly to do with the vocals and something in the songwriting rather than the slick electronic production, but there’s a certain kind of over-showiness and lack of bite there without taking it over into anything fun. They briefly throw off the resemblance briefly for the talky bit but it soon comes back with a vengeance and it does nothing for me.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Production team Sweetune floods an already-great exhortative track with musical signifiers — or as I should probably be calling them, “touches”. A guitar sting here, a robotic synth there, a remarkably unobtrusive key change at the end. Get through this, you’re awesome, shit’s just temporary – this is the kind of message I keep running into in our forays into K-pop, and it’s wonderful to encounter it in dance-pop form, rather than as a stultifying ballad.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Oh hey, it’s an A*Teens song: one big sproingy riff, vocals huddled like sardines in the ’00s mode, enough guitar twitching in the background for the producers to prove they actually do know what rock is, a key change (c.f. “Slammin’ Kinda Love“) and extremely compact, unsoaring production. Will nostalgia inflate my score? Yes. Is teen pop like this anymore? No.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Shine without the shimmer, aggressive without being infectious, with a brief mid-song break where the song dips its toe into the placid waters of R&B pop balladry before lurching back into its pep rally chant.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Kylie Minogue’s most recent productions have a polyurethane buoyancy: they’re plastic bullets hovering in air. These Korean women produce a similar artifact, but with an openness to the slight discordance: slap bass, power chords, and the faintest deceleration at the bridge. The production’s too damn crowded though.
[6]