The Music Dispatch: June 2nd, 2024 (2024)

Hi, this is the Music Dispatch! This has apparently become a bimonthly (once every two months) column in which I talk about new releases and whatever else tickled my fancy recently. I always feel like having to clarify that I still listen to music, even keep up with new releases every Friday. But nowadays, I wait until I know I have something to say. This now means it’s getting heavy on K-Pop, as you’ll see soon, but it also means that I can hopefully provide some perspective in addition to recommending something? (That’s for the 5 in brief section.)

aespa – Armageddon

Venerable K-Pop label SM Entertainment has always been tremendously bad at one thing: overseas promotion. In a bid to market the group to the United States, the songs that come with it suddenly sound very, very different from what the artist is known for. It doesn’t have to be a bad song; “The Boys” and “Regular” are far from that. But how else to explain the sudden left swerve that aespa did on “Spicy”? How else to explain the sudden bids of English-language singles such as “Life’s Too Short” and “Better Things”? The group, which made its brand identity on the metaversical (AI avatars, “Kwangya” – the literal Korean word for wilderness – serving as the world through which Black Mamba threatens the Real World, governed by goddess Naevis) seemed surprisingly agreeable on new releases. That is, until “Drama” brought us right back to Blackpink bombast with a fuller vocal melody. Both Spicy and Drama as EPs boasted tracks that seemed for another album; haphazard B-sides collected in a move that threw back an SM to almost ten, if not twenty years back.

But in the face of the NCT project dwindling down, RIIZE just getting started, and Red Velvet turning ten years old this August, aespa has got to give in their fourth year. “Supernova”, the lead single of first full-length Armageddon, has all the ingredients: in-demand producer Dem Jointz’ magic, an iconic sample (Afrika Bambataa’s “Planet Rock”, itself sampling Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europa Express”), a visual presentation that expanded upon aespa as supernatural beings and distant from the Real World. And, not unimportantly, haters and losers. The song is dancey. It’s cold. It’s endlessly replayable. The charts responded to the art.

The album, on the other hand, is not a masterpiece. Neither is the actual title of the record, which sounds like late-career BoA, SHINee, or more broadly NCT-esque. aespa has taken over. These are songs heavy on attitude, strong in its melodies, and decidedly hip-hop. The group sounds comfortable in this mode, Karina in particular, whose nasal voice projects a great amount of removed confidence and inflappable cool. This works really well for the first half of the album and brilliantly swerves to lighter fare from “Licorice” to “Bahama”, and then it’s right back to the classic SM thing of bringing back obvious vault tracks and gratuitous fanservice. “Live my Life” sounds ten years old and probably is. “Melody” is a ballad that would not have been out of place on a Red Velvet album.

This isn’t new to anyone who has been around a while; Perfect Velvet, for all that it is praised for, has similar luggage near the end of the album. The album as an art form (as a complete listening experience, front to back) is relatively new in K-Pop, anyway, maybe ten, eleven years old. Even now, it is a rarity. Coherence is not a feature, but a bug. And yet, I see a number of complaints on the album’s lack of coherence. There’s also this absolutely hilarious review by music critic Alexis Petridis that alleges it’s less about the music and more about everything else. I think this has been true about aespa… last year. Spicy and Drama are hardly coherent album experiences.

Nor do they need to be: their visual rollouts, showing alien occurences and supersized members respectively, were thrilling to follow. aespa represents a new ideal: the K-Pop group as creative induction and Pinterest inspo board. If metallic flames and royal blue AI skies remind you of the group, they have done their job. K-Pop is not to be compared to virtuosos like Magdalena Bay and Charli XCX. It’s closer to Dua Lipa: the album is a collection of bangers, a vehicle for singles, pretty Instagram pictures, and tours. (Radical Optimism proves this quite well in its failure.) The great miracle of Armageddon, actually, is that it is a fun listening experience. It is a strong record; no Savage, but very far from last year’s low points.

Doyoung – Youth

What is NCT in parts? So far, Taeyong, Ten, and even Jaehyun’s R&B fare have shown elements that prevailed for most of the supergroup’s discography, infused with their own taste. If “Shalala” reminded you of NCT, Taeyong’s green hair suggested it was the point; “TAP”, on the other hand, is closer to what he has cultivated on his Soundcloud and SM Station song, warm and lightly cheesy. What makes it NCT is Taeyong’s distinct voice.

Main vocal Doyoung is different from this. In a three-part documentary, we are told that this is on purpose; that Doyoung’s identity consists of both the NCT idol and his duties and the human born Kim Dong-young, who likes rock music. It comes in opposition to what is typically expected of an SM idol, the ballads, but even then, one would say that Doyoung would be perpendicular to what NCT 127 is known for and features in their discography. As it stands, the closest point of reference one has to full-length Youth (“Foam of Youth” in its native Korean) is Fact Check lead single “Angel Eyes”. A great majority of these songs are bright rock songs with the express purpose to chant along; I hear anime (“Little Light”, “Rest”), Korean rock (“Lost in California”), and JYP band Day6 must have been an especially potent inspiration point on the Kenzie-penned closer “Dallas Love Field”. The conceit here is immediately obvious: Doyoung’s vocals get full rein to soar as far as he likes. His rich baritone has a particular warmth to these tracks, which he combines with a dramatic sensibility as he details lyrics of great heartbreak and confusion.

What struck me in the documentary is how often Doyoung mentions his fans. They are the reason a self-described worrywart like him can keep going on; they are part of his identity; they are who he wants to sing to, who allow him to take risks. With all due respect to such a personal project, I don’t hear risk in the record. I mostly hear self-help songs, the type that Australian singer P!nk excels at. I don’t mean to say this as a bad thing; that type of music has its place and audience in radio. What I missed from the album was a sense of variety, however; songs that aren’t addressed to me and in fact towards no one but Doyoung himself.

We are given this in the all-too brief middle stretch of the album: “Serenade” is a coffeeshop R&B single that felt almost government-assigned; and piano ballads “Rewind” and “Warmth”, appearing back-to-back on the album. And here, one can almost see the alternative path Doyoung could have taken: an entire EP of him next to that great instrument, and far from the snoozers we’re used to, it would have been a moving, beautiful record not unlike his incredible Lee Mujin Service episode. It’s in the voice. It’s in the approach he makes that is so unlike other SM vocalists. The soul has not been lost. He’s not caught up in hitting the notes just right; or, if he is, we can’t tell. He sounds swept up in every song he sings, cover or original.

In that respect, I shouldn’t be too surprised that the song that finally wormed itself into my brain is the opening: “Beginning”, or “New Spring’s Song” in its native Korean. It is entirely written by Doyoung and a Disney ballad through and through, which is unsurprising given that lead composer Seo Donghwan’s involvement (who worked on IU’s “Love Wins All” earlier this year). One could discard the song by the description, and maybe I should have based on its aspirational attitude, but that final chorus is a showstopper. “We’re going to fly together to that universe”, he sings translated, and he sounds like a rocket ready to lift off. He is, however briefly, unaccompanied by any instrument; I am, however briefly, ready to fly with him.

I’m not here to defend the bad rep that ballads get. In fact, K-Pop fans don’t bash them enough. But there’s a world of difference between any track on Wish and “Let it Go” from Frozen, and Doyoung displays that here. In those moments I recognize that NCT is part of his sum, a rather small one in fact.

ARTMS – <DALL>

Jaden Jeong is unmatched when it comes to artistic vision. In his best known and fully realized girl group, Loona, the artistic vision manifests in a connected universe of beautifully strange things happening and it’s up to the (very dedicated) viewer to figure out what any of it means. Suns can defeat you and you can devour them for the price of sin; the moon always rises; I will be complete, completely new, newly complete. Part of what made Loona such an interesting project in its early days was that the lore was matched with compelling music, and it culminated in its strongest subunit, Odd Eye Circle. At its worst, Jeong’s artistic vision is indulgent, inaccessible, and paired with average, poorly mixed music. It’s a little easy to figure out what he’s into when you’re listening to anything other than K-Pop. Whatever Twitter timelines are made of, his and mine are the same.

If one was to assume that ARTMS, composed of five former Loona members (Haseul, Jinsoul, Heejin, Kim Lip and Cho*rry) was meant to be a wholly new project, DALL (short for Devine All Love & Live but really a nod to the generative AI image tool) dispels it sonically right off the bat. Most of the album runs like a Loona greatest hits record: the saccharine 1/3 (“Candy Crush”), the colorful and odd yyxy (“Unf/Air”), but most strongly coming through is Odd Eye Circle, particularly its Max & Match release: synth-drenched, reverb-heavy R&B (“Butterfly Effect”), garage (“Sparkle”) and big-drop-reliant pop of the late 2010s (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) have all featured on that EP before.

That is not to the album’s detriment, however. Song by song, these are a delight to the ears: unshowy, capable, and distinct vocals, confident production, and mixing optimized for headphone use. They are familiar in a comforting way, and it’s not hard to see the acclaim it receives on RateYourMusic (the same place that thinks Armageddon does not cohere). It is an album that is sequenced well with each track standing on its own; a K-pop ideal.

DALL stands out for two reasons: its two-months long rollout — which, as much as I like the album, did not showcase songs that strike me as singles (the sole exception being “Flower Rhythm”, reminiscent of Max & Match’s “Uncover”). “Birth”, the lead single, strikes me as a performance piece as popularized on Mnet’s poor program “Kingdom / Queendom” (on which Loona competed in its second season in 2022) with its numerous genre and tempo changes. It is striking, but its short runtime makes it an idea not fully realized. Still, it does suggest that K-Pop is warming up to the idea of an “era” that could (and does, with tours) take longer, as opposed to a flash of a moment that comes and goes.

Then there’s “Virtual Angel”. The music video cuts so fast that I sat for several minutes afterward completely out of it, but what a visual marvel and confident identity presented here. The idea of a magical girl in the music video carries over to the song, and I’m so happy to hear a K-Pop song go back to a sonic aesthetic akin to magical girl transformations. “Virtual Angel” updates it brilliantly with its layered vocal snippets, oscillating synths, and elegant vocal performances from all members. It’s not “Hi High”, or even “Girl Front”; it suggests a sadness hitherto absent from any big Loona single. Paired with the harsh CRT screens in the music video and an edgy cross shown throughout, I think we see, for the first time, what ARTMS could be outside of the Loona project. Who knows if Jaden Jeong will keep at this visual imagery. I suspect not even he does.

(This has better cuts, but warning for strobing lights in this one.)

5 in brief

Yves – Diorama The beat pattern is heavily reminiscent of Red Velvet’s “Automatic”, coupled with a scanning sound that appears once in the intro and then in the chorus. With a vibe this immaculate, all that Yves has to do is to keep up with the beat, without overpowering it or being overpowered. She succeeds brilliantly.

Vince Staples – Éttouffée New album Dark Times marries the dark, gloomy soundscapes of 2021’s self-titled and, on a track like this one, marries it with a danceable sensibility. An ode to the New Orleans his grandmother had to flee from, the bounce at the end of the track feels like a well-earned catharsis. But the chorus is one of Vince’s best too.

Kendrick Lamar – Not Like Us Though I originally had my side decided from the first diss on (I’m not picking Aubrey Drake Graham, ever) things got unseemly for me when the peak of blows exchanged was “You’re a pedophile” (Kendrick, “Not Like Us”) and “You beat up your wife” (Drake, on “Family Matters”). But while “Meet the Grahams” and “Family Matters” forces one to listen to the words as the production is deliberately sparse, “Not Like Us” is an earworm at every turn, from “Psst… I see dead people” to DJ Mustard’s shuffling beat all the way to “Certified Lover Boy? Certified Pedophiles WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP Dot f*ck ‘em up.”

Oh yeah, and if you want the less poppy version of what Kendrick is talking about, I highly recommend Frank Guan’s essay on Drake… from 2015. What a read. What a critic.

Robyn – U Should Know Better feat. Snoop Dogg Listening to Body Talk for the first time cinched for me f(x)’s sonic inspirations. This is electropop at its logical endpoint, cold and precision-engineered, which allows Robyn and Snoop Dogg to flex their iciest accomplishments quite fittingly in turn.

A Tribe Called Quest – Check The Rhime Earlier this year, during my usual week off (I do not leave the old year nor enter the new year with work) I decided to listen to East Coast Rap classics from the 90s. Obviously Low End Theory was part of it, and off that album, “Check The Rhime” has endured the longest in my rotation. The saxophone samples (from Average White Band’s “Love Your Life”) and the percussion sample near the end (from Biz Markie’s “Nobody Beats the Biz”) is a masterclass of beat alchemy. I fully admit half of my plays come from wanting to listen to that! Phife and Q-Tip’s call-and-response is iconic, as is Phife’s verse (“Here’s a funky introduction of how nice I am / Tell your mother, tell your father, send a telegram”) is pure poetry.

Beethoven Has Been Real Silent Since