This week, Girl’s Day at the Jukebox is Sunday…
[Video][Website]
[6.67]
Sonya Nicholson: At first I thought the bonkers shouty K-pop ending chorus was misplaced — just thrown in to adhere to a formula — but actually it’s the key to a song that’s as much about frustration as it is about anticipation. If the group needs to shout to let off some sexual tension, who I am to say they can’t? And anyway, frustrated shouting is a Girls’ Day specialty. I have this on an exercise mix where it tops off a giving-notice-of-my-intention-to-go-nuts trilogy (“Dual Life,” “Art of Seduction“). When Girls’ Day clutch their heads while singing “you drive me insane,” they have already arrived at the next stage — exhaustion — and the guitars know it too. This group is nothing if not determined, though, so they brush themselves off and head back into the fray for another round. This gives “Expectation/Expect Me” the feeling of a long war of attrition — not always pleasant, but so appropriate to the subject. The guitars and the synths are very eighties, but they’re worked into a late-aughts build-drop frenzy in a combo so pulse-raising you wonder why more groups don’t do it. In the end the song’s production choices, grit, and dance tutorial all earn points for what would otherwise be a somewhat repetitive and brainless dance track. Of course, all this depends on how much you enjoy dwelling in a state of acute frustration for, like, ages before catching even a glimmer of (slight) release in the first place.
[7]
Iain Mew: Reminds me of stuff, like 4Minute’s “Volume Up” or Orange Caramel’s “Lipstick,” that has a lot more in common with Eurobosh than most of the songs from Korea that we cover. Compared to those, “Expectation” is missing both a saxophone part and a level of catchiness, which means it doesn’t tread the annoying/compelling line in the same way and for the most part is competent and likeable but not thrilling. There are signs of something more forceful in the robot vocal filters and excellent set-pieces of rap and joint vocal overload, but the song as a whole is quite reliant on those, or at least expectation of those.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Pegged this one as another conflicted-relationship song posing as a pop banger, until the climax of the track when their voices come together and surge into a big sonic ball before blowing up. Pushes this up a point.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Bright, smart, loping. For some reason it’s the details around the edges that charmed me here, the cymbal splashes that speak in resolved riddles.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Mindless Eurobosh but for those vocal leaps. They invert everything.
[6]
Alfred Soto: I can never have enough guitars and downbeats and wa-ah-ah’s; it pumps the saccharine out of my system.
[6]