Sexy lady pilots GO WILD! And it’s not a Heart cover, so don’t worry, nobody’s getting hurt.
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[7.17]
Frank Kogan: Had developed a prejudice against producer Brave Brothers as a man with a clumsy hand and against Sistar as simulated K-pop, strong voices but no character. This track is the opposite of clumsy; recalls ’60s reggae, drizzlingly beautiful instruments and feather-light singing. I’m still not hearing hunks of personality in Sistar, but feather light is its own character, doesn’t need hunks, and I’m happily surprised.
[9]
Iain Mew: A massive and welcome contrast to 4Minute’s song that came out atthe same time. I love how funky and classy this is, gliding from section to section effortlessly even while including the improbable lines “I don’t want to cry/Destroy my eyes.” The piano hammers away without ever being too dominant and the keening wordless vocal sections top the song off perfectly, a brief glance at what could happen if Sistar weren’t so in control. They also mark the first time that Grimes/K-pop comparisons have ever made any sense to me.
[8]
Brad Shoup: The group’s choice of video-shoot location is telling: Vegas, the city where signifiers go to die. (It doesn’t help that they chose two hotels that have seen better days – the Riviera and Circus Circus – as backdrops.) I don’t know if “my boy” is a subgroup reference, but it surely gave me fonder thoughts than those push-button coos and endless cymbal hits.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: “Alone” is indistinct vocally but impeccable in structure; its piano and bass are like taps to the pleasure centres and the rest of the song is heartbreak, cocktail dresses at poolside and bizarre word association (“destroy my eyes”). What I mean by this is that it’s both the most opulent K-pop song I’ve ever heard, while also being one of the funkiest, and the half-rap bit at the end isn’t even remotely awful.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: I love the staccato piano, the disco strings and bass, the flanged synth, the helium-high vocal accents. If you’d told me it was a song about falling in love, or girlpower togetherness, or kittens in sunflower hats, I’d have believed you, and welcomed the thought — but that all this joyful energy is put to the service of a complaint about romantic loneliness is practically made to order for me.
[8]
Alex Ostroff: “I forget things that had been here with you,” reads the tattoo on her leg, and that just says it all, doesn’t it? Sexily melancholy maximalist disco transcends all barriers – national, temporal, spatial, linguistic.
[7]