Held up to the mirror, the credits read, “Mr. Mister – ‘Girls Generation'”
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[6.88]
Madeleine Lee: This year marks Girls’ Generation’s 7th anniversary, and SM has spent the last few promotional cycles searching for a way to keep their star girl group fresh, grafting new-era schoolyard rap and/or maturity-signifying retro sounds onto the girls with varying degrees of success. Little did they realize that they’d had a workable prototype for the group’s mature sound this whole time: Girls’ Generation, their first Japanese full-length from 2011. Half the album is remakes of Korean singles — standard procedure for most K-pop groups debuting in Japan — but the other half is dance pop of a type the group had barely touched before: glitchy, dark, and not so much futuristic as ultra-modern. The trick is that while SNSD were never built for hip-hop, the members’ professional air and well-developed voices translate excellently into this kind of haughty electro. “Mr. Mr.” is the first post-Oh! single to capitalize on this (even Girls’ Generation‘s lead single was the cheeky “Mr. Taxi”), giving an echoing, bass-heavy backdrop to the group’s synthesized harmonies. But rather than rejecting the previous few experiments as failed, it incorporates them as new skills. The rap is distributed to make the chorus a snappy call-and-response; the vocals don’t blend into the soundscape like before, but sound out in your face, and by the end Tiffany and Taeyeon have summoned enough lung power to haul the key up twice. The lyrics are the usual cheerleading for dudes, but that’s to be expected. Girls’ Generation haven’t changed; they’re finally taking advantage of what they’ve already got.
[8]
Megan Harrington: This song wastes almost no time cutting to the confectious refrain — the word “mister” and glittery disco which are a combination to rival watermelon suckers with bubblegum centers — but as soon as you think that refrain is the climax, the song parachutes three successive climaxes and then cuts the power. Their sense of how much I want as a listener (too much) is dead on.
[8]
Sonya Nicholson: Girls Generation can sell anything live, including this. I appreciate where I think they were trying to go with this (relatively) down-tempo song and its accompanying hospital-themed MV; I just object to the way “Mr. Mr.” sounds like it was made out of building blocks that could have been assembled into something else — the songwriting equivalent of Ruby on Rails.
[6]
David Sheffieck: This song — the chorus especially — would fit smoothly into the rash of disco throwbacks of last year, which seems like a weird choice for a group that at its best sounds like it’s pushing music into a crazy hypercolor future. The hooks here are still great, no argument there, but their impact isn’t the same.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The beat (“Into the Groove”!) and swagger are as irresistible as intended, and I can’t deny a tune that wrests the title hook from the mid eighties act responsible for two Number One horrors.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Killer chorus — it’s got that “Forget Me Nots” strut at the end. The rest is all trance interludes and a sassy bass breakdown; they spend the whole song begging the guy to dream big, but it never occurred to anyone to bring in more epic disco, so epic that key changes can’t stay its force. I’m scoring what could’ve been, clearly.
[7]
Iain Mew: The filthy fuzz intro is a delight. It feels a shame when it gets mixed down, but that sets up that the approach for “Mr. Mr.” is a pull back from “I Got a Boy” and its smash cuts. This time Girls’ Generation may not be working with quite the same wealth of parts, but they’ve got a grasp of them all and have the transitions down perfectly. The way the technicolour chorus appears like it’s emerging from the song’s cocoon makes it dazzle all the more.
[8]
Jessica Doyle: Pleasant enough, but you can skip to Track 2.
[5]