Korean girl group dangerously courts Van Morrison yuks…
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[6.43]
Jer Fairall: “‘Sixth Sense” is apparently “an expression of the limitations of experiencing music with only five senses.” Whatever that means, they are certainly intent on overwhelming at least one of the existing senses. There’s a sudden Timberlake-like falsetto jump one second, a “Toxic”-like mock-orchestral tumble in another, a fragment of the Sex and the City theme thrown in somewhere near the middle, yet they are all tiny bits orbiting the song’s undefined, shapeless whole. Critics like to call things “exhausting” when what they really mean is “exasperating,” but let me assure you that listening to this song makes me feel literally tired.
[3]
Brad Shoup: This begins as a march, ends in paranoia. In between, the word “pop” gets treated as a lofted totem, not onomatopoeia — this group’s got pipes, and they’re always in service of the song. Soon the sharp brass arrives to overthrow the disco, as snippets of talking and laughter (both fore- and backgrounded) muddle the text. I would’ve rated it higher if the fascist slash of the intro were sustained for the song’s length.
[6]
Iain Mew: The storming intro to “Sixth Sense,” strings swooping in and out, is magnificent, and Brown Eyed Girls come remarkably close to following through on it. Powerful vocals, the staccato “CAN. YOU. FOLLOW?” like they’re rolling their eyes at someone particularly slow, the bridge’s seamless merging of hip-hop stomp with jazzy brass, even the manic laugh buried in the mix — the song is bursting with fun ideas, and they’re all pulled off really well.
[8]
Anthony Easton: Am I the only one who thinks that this has a solid late Michael Jackson vibe? I love the anger, the martial beat and the power of this in its full orchestrated mass. It could pass for a Bond theme in places, and they could almost pull off a full Dame Bassey. Exciting!
[8]
Alfred Soto: Since James Bond movies play best as fodder for international audiences, I hope a shrewd producer hooks these South Korean ladies with the right theme song, preferably one with harmonic shifts as crunching as this.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Musical experimentation means musical failure, just by numbers. So while enough disco strings tie themselves around this in enough ways to keep it from soaring, thank goodness someone’s trying new knots.
[5]
Doug Robertson: Swirling disco synths, a big bowlful of attitude and a chorus that gets under your skin and wriggles away like a happy maggot: everything here has been chosen with the express purpose of attacking your pleasure centres, and there’s no point in fighting as you will lose. Forward-looking retroism isn’t easy — take your eye off the ball for just a second and it ends up just being retro; try too hard and it becomes contrived. But this sounds so effortless, so casual and so damned good that the only era it sounds like is that of the ever-changing now. That’s exactly what music should be sounding like.
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