After School's Good Year (Year 3)
Of three recent albums by K-pop big shots (SNSD, 2NE1, and After School, w/ 4minute and Super Junior-M in my to-do pile), After School's is head and shoulders above the rest, once again. I still have no sense of the members' individual musical personalities, if they have any, and not much sense of a collective personality either, sonically. "Smooth vocals with forceful accompaniment" is what I come up with, pretty much, plus occasional strong pangs, the latter more often in Korea than in Japan. In their early days, feisty was good, gentle was bad. Now gentle feels deep, and when the vocals go to what I call "easy vocal washes" the resulting mist is like a sharp shower, rather than blah.
The album (Dress To Kill) is in Japanese, its two singles written and produced by Shinichi Osawa. Listening to Shinichi Osawa's Works 2008-2012, which also tends to go for a smooth front and a propulsive engine, I'm nonetheless thrown back to the feeling of distance I often get from J-pop, without knowing if the distance is mine or theirs. And I say to myself "I don't get it." Whereas After School's Japanese work gets to me every bit as well as their Korean.
Osawa aside, most of the songwriters on Dress To Kill are European (Scandinavia, Germany) or from the European diaspora (Australia, Canada), though that's not infrequent when K-pop goes to Japan - and probably not that infrequent in J-pop, but I haven't yet paid J-pop enough attention to know. (And, again aside from Osawa, few of Dress To Kill's songwriters are prominent enough to get a Wikip page.)
Sorry I can't give you more than a few vague adjectives here, "smooth," "forceful," "gentle," "propulsive." I'm excited that arbitrary_greay got a keyboard and is " going to go to town with learning music theory." I hope she shares.
(My previous two posts entitled "After School's Good Year" are here: 2013 and 2012.)
Click to viewThe album (Dress To Kill) is in Japanese, its two singles written and produced by Shinichi Osawa. Listening to Shinichi Osawa's Works 2008-2012, which also tends to go for a smooth front and a propulsive engine, I'm nonetheless thrown back to the feeling of distance I often get from J-pop, without knowing if the distance is mine or theirs. And I say to myself "I don't get it." Whereas After School's Japanese work gets to me every bit as well as their Korean.
Osawa aside, most of the songwriters on Dress To Kill are European (Scandinavia, Germany) or from the European diaspora (Australia, Canada), though that's not infrequent when K-pop goes to Japan - and probably not that infrequent in J-pop, but I haven't yet paid J-pop enough attention to know. (And, again aside from Osawa, few of Dress To Kill's songwriters are prominent enough to get a Wikip page.)
Sorry I can't give you more than a few vague adjectives here, "smooth," "forceful," "gentle," "propulsive." I'm excited that arbitrary_greay got a keyboard and is " going to go to town with learning music theory." I hope she shares.
(My previous two posts entitled "After School's Good Year" are here: 2013 and 2012.)