K-pop (2015)

desperate sleaze is their thing now - remember how the ryanair CEO used to release stories about how the airline would be getting rid of chairs and customers would pay for toilets, etc, as a publicity stunt? The article about Stellar refusing to dance in thongs reminded me of that, with maybe a side of T-ara -style upper management dysfunction.

not posting the video 'cause it's lol, but i actually like how messy the chorus sounds in b2st's "yey." it's almost violent, but once you get used to it it's pretty straightforward. there's just a weird (cool) aggression to the way it's mixed

"gotta go to work" is hitting me way better now w/o the video, too

The B2ST mini is solid, I'm liking 가져가 a lot right now. The chorus to YeY is the only aggressive thing on it though which makes it even odder.

https://soundcloud.com/user754783736/sets/beast-ordinary-2015

it g ma remix with asap ferg, waka flocka, and father man that's unexpected (dumbfoundead too but that's not that weird)
and tablo is gonna have a track with joey badass in august ?!

I mean I guess it is weird that dumbfoundead is here considering everyone involved. it's kind of surprising even seeing flocka, ferg, and father on the same track too

my prior exposure to DFD has been pretty underwhelming but i think he's good here

and i think b2st just realized they couldn't keep coming back to the charts with ballads, and went for some variety. smart move on paper, but i'm sad to see the song underperforming by their standards. so far, at least – hope it picks up! i love how b2st's sound and creative control has evolved in the past year or two, would hate for that to be jeopardized...

yea DFD is talented but i'm not too big on his stuff either. he shines as a freestyler/battle rapper and it's precisely because his beats and delivery aren't particularly unique (being a talented rapper can only get you so far nowadays y'know?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w62JoFqsdhM

oh my god

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkpZ05Vkvqk

so promising

and i like me some wonder girls, but i've never been a huge fan. this totally could change that

crying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcu7yZBeSKw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9QXQz6uE0M

http://i.imgur.com/b34NdJ3.jpg

not sold on everything at the moment but the album is solid.
one black night really hitting the spot for me atm. the rapping in the album doesn't work for me most of the time, though i think i'm happy a track like 'back' exists here?

This sounds pretty great on first listen - a real shame Sohee couldn't be here though for this as I feel she would be a perfect fit. But Sunmi has a presence unlike most in kpop.

nice screencap, joshua -- that's my favorite moment.

was a little underwhelmed by "i feel you" on first listen but two later and i love it. need some more time with the album but my sense of it is that all of it is pretty great, except tracks 8-9 and the closer. def one of the most cohesive k-pop albums to date, which is nice

the 4 shinee repackage tunes are all in the pretty good to pretty great range ("chocolate" being my favorite). makes the full album painfully overlong and unfocused, but if you were to replace the 4 weakest songs on odd with the new ones it'd have been pretty much perfect

(even if still not everything a shinee album called odd could have been)

granted, "married" seems to be falling down the charts after barely a day out ("i feel you" hasn't gone off with a bang, but just hopped into a low third on instiz with little competition). got me thinking – has SM had a legit domestic hit at any point this whole year? even "call me baby," the main thrust behind exo's physical million-seller (mostly international fans, of course), was nothing compared to miss a or big bang's showings (or even jyp's own), and "party" attracted huge interest as soshi's first summer single in 3 or 4 years but that died quick. am i forgetting something?

[watches "i feel you"] [permanently transfigures into the hearts in eyes emoji]

okay! close 1.5 million views in 24 hours, and *finally* someone has knocked hyukoh off the top spot of instiz (with a decent score of 210...for perspective, miss a at their best this year were mid 300s, "loser" peaked out at around 410 i think). they're robbing an empty house for sure, though, and sadly when big bang/GD&TOP drop again in around 10 hours WG will be chased off immediately.

meanwhile "married to the music" is barely clinging to the top 10. at least "view" hung around quietly for a couple weeks.

love basically every song on the wonder girls record except "back." "oppa" seems suspect but then the chorus is totally killer

The WG band showcase http://omonatheydidnt.livejournal.com/16317755.html

they've got a long way to go before they've got any kind of stage presence (hitting all the notes right would be step one), but honestly, they're a lot better than i thought they would be. yubin was one of the less impressive ones in the teasers but i'm shocked how well she's generally keeping a beat, owning fills, and rapping/singing while playing. the nature of the instrument helps her to be the only one with real charisma so far, too.

if w/ the exception of yenny they actually only started learning instruments halfway into their album sessions, though (which, knowing how k-pop works, prob wouldn't have been much more than half a year ago), this is beyond impressive. if they actually keep shedding they could be a pretty compelling band in a year or two.

Read something somewhere which suggested they wouldn't just ditch the band concept moving forward. Would've been a shame to waste all that effort.

they sound real shaky in a few of those but "i feel you" sounds great

"Married to the Music" is great and reminds me of fx "Shadow" (the main melody).

oh interesting, can't compare right now but the main melodies from both? which sections? SM's reuse of lyrical themes and melodies has got my interest lately – a good example being how exo's "you're a, you're a / you're a transformer" reconstitutes f(x)'s "joha, joha / NU A-B-O"

i like the gd&top track, prob the best of m-a-d-e after "bae bae"

Set your instiz chart watch - Infinity Challenge song fest tunes will be released on the 12th

wow. i am shocked! by the time i woke up here (8am), "i feel you" was back at #1, while the new BB fell to *3rd,* behind hyukoh's song (still!). the gd&top track is all the way down at 7th! perhaps YG really misread what the korean public wants this month...

go wonder girls!!

eh bigbang fatigue was bound to set in eventually. that said, I'm glad gd&top continue to bring the best out in each other, regardless of whatever personal issues they've had between them. the video is entertainingly juvenile :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8t8A8E_Tqc

"i feel you" grows

it does. vaguely wondering if AOA will revive their band sub-unit if WG keeps doing well. They were good, plus I don't hate Jimin's rapping so much in this context. XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz3mYbFtC0w

it's kind of hard for me to fairly compare AOA black to AOA white when white's had a string of much better songs starting with "miniskirt." the band concept is only really going to be compelling when it stops being a concept, though, and actually functions at least halfway like a band. shaky live performances for WG are a good start (that's how low the bar is – compare this to japan, where competent idol girl group rock bands are old news), but until they at least start playing a little bit on their own albums and using their bandness to come up with and develop material of their own. WG were purported to have that down this time (JYP saying they learned instruments not to play on the album, but to write material for it), but then hyerim or one of the other girls said that they only got the idea to become a band halfway through recording, so it's sort of unclear.

the good news is that WG and JYP have pledged their commitment to handling more of the creative/recording process down the line, and "i feel you" is already doing well enough that i think they'll feel encouraged to keep pushing.

and man, BB fatigue is one thing – i get that you can't keep pushing a 300+ score for a few weeks straight every month – but a new BB (and GD&TOP) single being sub-100 just twelve hours out from release is...well, confirmation that YG doesn't do sajaegi, to put it one way.

rallying bigtime in the past couple hours though, both scores doubled and now WG is third. pretty low scores in general for the past few weeks, but they're on the up.

well the thing about AOA black was that it seemed like FNC was always sort of half-hearted about it - they were rarely allowed to perform live and other than "Moya", most of their songs were just band versions of AOA white songs anyway.

it was more like they were trying to see if they could create a female CNBlue but it didn't work so they decided to abandon the idea entirely.

soyrev, the rising melody of "I'm married to the music" sounds like the rising melody of "when the sun rises" in Shadow. Just a brief bit, but it's the highlight of the chorus in both songs.

And Zutter is great, I'm glad GD&TOP are feeling free to make the music they like and not what's public-friendly...if the general public needs a while to warm up to the song or never gets on board all the better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=maSoUetHock

And the mini this comes from is solid too https://youtu.be/uzGNybp892E?list=PLvBVZD15ofEWPQINPN-6n7PETaR6zyPho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maSoUetHock

Going after the military fans like Wanna.B and Nine Muses