From Joshua, chiptune-tinged nu-disco from Kazakhstan…
[Video][Website]
[6.78]
Will Adams: A timeline of my thoughts: 8-bit plus that ’90s house organ tone? Brilliant. Fat drums to give the disco some heft? Yes, please. Funk guitars? Of course! Charismatic vocalist to helm all of this production? Right-o. Massive chorus? Wait, where’s the massive chorus?
[6]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: A spirited electric slide through a Kazakh disco, with enough hookiness to copyright its chant-worthy title and enough spirited eccentricity (Game Gear noises, Justice-style clipped low end) to mark it Blog-Pop Champ of 2010.
[7]
Brad Shoup: A roller-rink jam with the ambient arcade sounds baked in, “Kim Ushin?” glides in on a turn-of-the-century chillout bassline, which then gets turned inside-out to match the disco strokes. The result is something that could hail from the Gangnam District, minus the vocal garbling. It’s relentless.
[8]
Mallory O’Donnell: It’s tempting for me to read too much in the fact that this is Kazakh, and search for an Asian influence in the gloss or delivery of this. It might be made more interesting if there were one–as it stands, this is neither more nor less exciting than any other boilerplate Mediterranean disco song since the Bronze Age. But would I dance to it in a wine bar in Malta? Yes, yes I would.
[5]
Iain Mew: Girls’ Generation’s first Japanese album in 2011 featured several new tracks produced by Japanese producer STY. Two of them, “The Great Escape” and “You-aholic,” sounded like disco pop built in part on top of the sounds of ancient home computer equipment. They were good, but I wished they’d carried through on that sound more — more of the blunt sounds! Bigger tunes to contrast to them! A couple of years later and almost certainly unrelated (good luck finding the production credits without knowing Russian), “Kim Ushin?” delivers what I wanted and then some: swishy disco with a massive chorus, powerful singing, and a production which carries more of its percussive machine loops beyond the intro.
[9]
Patrick St. Michel: Not sold on those verses, but that chorus delivers a lot of squiggly electronic goodness and 8-bit bloopery.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: “Delia Smith style, you know, Psychedelia Smith, we just chuck it together and mix it up and see what happens.” So described the lead singer of Raygun (imagine a set of Hoosiers matryoshka dolls; they’d be the smallest) his band’s avant-garde attitude to music as he tried to launch them on a late night TV programme in 2009. Of course, he was ridiculed, but wasn’t he on to something? “Kim Ushin?” is such a well combined melange of sounds that it can only be described as Robin S-ton Blumenthal, 8-bitsley Harriott and Nigella Rodgers together baking something resembling a Madeon (madeleine). Just a shame the repetition of the title causes it to end up tasting a bit samey.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Like my belly after half a Christmas cake and a liter of eggnog, the pleasure of excess does not exceed the painful consequences.
[4]
Joshua Smith: Earlier this year, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I binged on just about every pop music video from Kazakhstan I could find on YouTube. By the end, I was left knowing hardly any more about the scene than when I started; nobody’s writing about this stuff in English, and Google translate helps with the few Russian comments, but not the Kazakh ones. So without much context I’m forced to draw my own conclusions, for example, how Kazakh pop often has in common with Russian pop production that seems intended more for headphone listening than a night at the club: a lot going on without becoming a dynamic-range-compressed mess. Or how it shares with that other, much more familiar K-Pop an affinity for boy bands and girl groups (Zhanar is herself currently a member of a group called KeshYOU) as well as a tendency to freely mix and match every form of pop music from the past half-century (note the New Jack Swing of the KeshYOU clip and the chiptune-disco of this one). Plus, sometimes a Central Asian folk instrument I’ve never heard of will show up in a song. Ultimately, these characteristics tick a lot of boxes for me, and “Kim ushin?” is the type of creative, well-written song that’s interesting no matter where it comes from.
[9]