Since only a couple of the boys are in fact 17, we have been forced to cancel our scheduled Ladytron reference for 2015. Apologies for the inconvenience.
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[6.75]
Madeleine Lee: Their debut “Adore U” was fresh and precocious, and this follow-up single uses some of its best bits — dog-in-sunglasses-cool guitar, a neo-New Jack chorus shouting out the onomatapoeia of a crush, and a keen sense of which members are interchangeable for which parts — and remains as fresh-sounding by cranking up the BPM. Wish the lyrics were more “even if my lips are dry, I want to sing to you” and less “I am outside your house” though.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Innocuous plastic funk — Average Korean Band, let’s call them.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: You know, its pretty ambitious to ensure that a group this big has a cohesive song where this many kids can get a brief little showcase for 5 or 6 seconds. Unfortunately it’s also fairly by the numbers and demonstrates very little unique qualities so none of these kids get enhanced by the teen-musical rigidity of the production. File this under: “When fairness and consideration goes wrong.”
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: Just when I think I’ve burned out on Korean boy bands and the subsequent “the boy band of now!” chatter that ignores the past six years, here comes another new outfit with a another Rube Goldberg machine of a song featuring a sticky hook. This would be annoying if the results weren’t so solid.
[7]
Megan Harrington: The bulk of “Mansae” reminds me of Maroon 5 in chart destruction mode, but in the same way that Maroon’s five isn’t even half of Seventeen’s thirteen, so is “Mansae,” in its layers upon layers of glittering detail, more than twice as stuffed as its predecessor.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Good boy-band songs often get shot into the stratosphere by a second or too of sublime stupidity — Mansae has the perfect interjection “I’m so stupid” and throws it down your throat fifteen seconds in. Yes, it’s a bit “Maroon 5 does ‘Uptown Funk’ and gets it wrong by a decade and also makes it a hot, cluttered mess,” but it is pretty damn hot.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Like a lot of Korean boy groups we’ve covered, the New Jack collapses the pocket in a blink. It’s surround sound: nonstop trebly dudes dispatched into the fray. I wish it’d been all loping raps, but it’s still an impressive amount.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: This largely sticks to K-pop boy band formula – verse, rap break, return to verse, chorus, lather/rinse/repeat – but when it’s done this expertly, I don’t care. The chorus on “Mansae,” in particular, soars, as perfect as pop gets. Think the perfection of “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” or “You Got It (The Right Stuff)”: that’s how good this.
[9]