Let’s get conceptual, conceptual…
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[6.00]
Madeleine Lee: With no Ridley Scott epic about a Biblical woman anywhere on the horizon, Gain offers an alternative with a mini album themed around Eve, “the first woman to challenge taboos.” Elsewhere on the album the theme is interpreted more playfully, but here it’s given the full processional tempo/”mystical” instrumental stings/proclaiming from the tops of mountains treatment (the musical equivalent of swords and sandals). Gain’s voice doesn’t have enough power to make this as imperious or thunderous as it wants to be; you get the sense Xia Junsu would have killed this, though it’s possible that he’d have killed it by overdoing it. Her best moment is when she turns into the snake whispering conspiracies in your ear, sounding every bit as threatening and potent as her central metaphor.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Sounds like En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go” for a new age, complete with a whirring body and a hell of a chassis.
[6]
Iain Mew: The grandeur and ineffable scale of Ayumi Hamasaki’s “Brillante” packed into half the runtime and with a pop chorus, it takes skill and conceptual grounding to keep it powerful rather than confused. The lyrics actually have little of the Eve concept, but the monologue is something else, Gain twisting through fantasy in senses sexual, fantastical, deceitful, as the music turns hallucinatory and demonic. That and the title are not that much to go on, but I sat through plenty of Catholic school assemblies, and Philip Pullman’s angry response to Paradise Lost was important in my life, and for me there’s enough here to fill in the gaps and then some.
[9]
Micha Cavaseno: Don’t fall for the fanfare and the drama; this song is lyrically close to the sort of “bad romance” fodder of low-grade industrial waste and is a lumpen unswinging bit of “edge” on the production side. I could probably mix this amongst The Genitorturers and The Birthday Massacre and be depressed as to how easily it’d be at home among such “peers.”
[2]
Will Adams: There was a lot of potential with the title and the concept of its parent album, and Gain is a convincing vocal presence, but the unnecessary organ fluff and stuttering flourishes seriously hampered it.
[5]
Mo Kim: The grandiose orchestral sweep of “Sixth Sense” is still there in “Paradise Lost,” but it’s been tempered by something approaching defeat. Gain’s voice tends to thin out in higher ranges: here that proves affecting, her strain speaking more than the dimly-lit instrumental machinery she’s surrounded by. Lots of quiet choices, all of them respectable, even if I find myself from embracing it fully.
[7]