It’s the 40 Hottest Bears in Tech!
[Video][Website]
[5.00]
Sonya Nicholson: Funnily enough, Lee Hi – Survival Audition Kpop Star second-place finalist, bringer of Adele to Korea – is the same age as these two middle school girls. Her debut EP is actually really solid, but her company unfortunately picked the most blandly upbeat song on it as the single. I hope that doesn’t become a trend in Kpop.
[5]
Patrick St. Michel: I went to K-Pop Night Out at SXSW this year, an event mostly hyped up as being the first time a Korean pop act – represented by f(x) – played the festival AND the state of Texas. Accordingly, most fans and media present were there for the pop group going on at 1:30 in the morning. Yet the show, which was partially funded by government money, was trying to dispel a long-standing notion that became even more inescapable during last year’s Psy-clone: K-Pop isn’t an accurate description of sound. Thus, K-Pop Night Out also featured punk, psychedelic rock, balladry and more as a way to educate folks that K-Pop encompasses a lot. Not many people paid attention to anything besides f(x). So I’m thankful for someone like Lee Hi, who boasts a sound very different than the “Gangnam Style”-“Gee”-“I Am The Best” pyramid most Western media folks only know but is signed to the same label as heavyweights Big Bang, 2NE1 and, yeah, Psy. Even if I think her music thus far – “It’s Over” included – sounds just good, I’m glad stuff like this exists as a way to show how varied Korean pop music actually is.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Sort of cocktail jazzy, sort of a bit rockish (in the light use of that phrase), mostly competent, but deeply steady and not really interesting.
[4]
Iain Mew: I am disappointed to find that the chorus starts “deulli deulli” rather than “delete delete”, because that seemed like a clever and modern way to introduce total finality. Luckily Lee Hi does a good enough job on the chorus to sell that anyway. The rest is more song, less showcase compared to “1, 2, 3, 4”, but I’m going to remember the video and its G-Dragon bear (G-Bear?) for longer and more fondly than any of it.
[6]
Will Adams: Lee Hi’s voice is smoky and emotive, but it deserves more than stale 12 bar blues and a copycat synthetic sax.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: There’s a perfectly palatable song in here, but it’s obscured by a near-fatal flaw: the backing. It creates the same kind of dissonance as when people in the 80s tried to make 60s-referencing tracks with the tinny production prevalent at the time, like Mari Wilson’s “Just What I Always Wanted” or The Maisonettes “Heartache Avenue” (both A+ bangers nonetheless, especially the latter). Instead of “classy”, it just sounds quite cheap, at best like something from a low budget children’s party album that no-one will ever buy, or the demo track you might accidentally start on a keyboard in a school music lesson when you’re actually looking for the “DJ” sound effects and rave noises.
[5]
Crystal Leww: This watered down Christina Aguilera circa 2006 thing is cute, but it doesn’t really do much for me.
[4]
Brad Shoup: What I would’ve paid to hear Don Fagen butt in.
[4]