It’s that time of week again – Kpopalypse roundup time!  Let’s check out some more new releases!

Teen Top – Love Is

Love is never having to say you’re sorry to Kpopalypse for polluting the world with shit ballads because your new comeback is actually decent for once.

LaBoum – Hwi Hwi

LaBoum continue to be given better than average songs.  Also am I being delusional or do these girls look like somebody actually feeds them.  Maybe that’s just on my mind after thinking about Melanie eating three nut bars and a banana per day.

Minzy ft. Flowsik – Ninano

It’s a bit dull and monotone but it’s actually a step up from the minimal stuff she used to do most recently in 2NE1.  At least if nothing else she’s finally dancing again.

Loona ft. Haseul – Vivi

The song is okay but this girl’s jaw creeps me out – how much did she get shaved off?  How do her bottom teeth even stay in place?

Unit Black – Steal Your Heart

The latest Boys24 subunit is more tropical shithouse, because there just isn’t enough of that sound in k-pop lately.

Haeri – Pattern

It’s a weird week in k-pop where almost everyone releases boring ballad crap except a Davichi member.

Miso – KKPP

Yolo Hyuna: Nugu Edition is actually a bit better than the original.

Wassup – Color TV

This is a bit like their debut song at half speed, and while that’s usually a criticism, in their case their debut was so fast that half-speed is still listenable.

Zico – She’s A Baby

What is this soft-ass jazz-lite nonsense.  I guess we can now call him “soggy cookie”.

Berry Good – BibbidiBobbidiBoo

Now that the songwriting genius behind all Berry Good’s best material has sadly passed away, we have to settle for the usual k-pop dice game with their new material.  Apart from the cool guitar riff we definitely rolled snake eyes with this one.

IU & Oh Hyuk – Can’t Love You Anymore

Sometimes there’s no time in the promotional cycle to make expensive-ass videos so you gotta say fuck it let’s just get the projector out and save that cash for a future song that might actually be decent.

BONUS SONGS

Eunji ft. Hareem – The Spring

Taxi driving is one of the last few unskilled labour jobs left for people with no skills or qualifications other than a drivers license.  The pay and hours are universally rubbish across the board in this industry but yeah go ahead and glamorise it with this shit ballad you cunts.  No taxi-driver on earth looks this well-rested or smiles this much.

Kisum ft. Gilgibonggu – Sleep Tight

Is Kisum ever going to “go hard”?  Probably not.  I didn’t promote her in Nugu Alert so she could do boring shit like this.  Come on, step it up girl.

Hyolyn & Changmo – Blue Moon

Why top-bill your producer like this when it’s just the same boring tropical shithouse that everybody else is doing right now.  If I was this much of a boring trend-following cunt I’d want to be as anonymous as possible.

Lena Park – Courting

If my car broke down anywhere within a kilometre of this girl singing boring slow songs randomly in the street I’d be upset too.

Jia – Candy

It’s barely more than a lyric video, I feel like I’ve been robbed of fap material as she actually looks great in the ultra-tiny live-action cuts of this one.  Come on Banana Culture, if you’ve got enough money to give every T-ara member a Ferrari, surely you could have dropped a bit of cash on presenting Jia a bit better.

Puer Kim – A Daughter Of Your Age

Speaking of which, Puer Kim is back to trolling her fans again by refusing to appear in her own videos.

Kim Nayoung – Being An Adult

It gets a little better as it goes along, but it’s sad times for me when I’m actually reaching for something positive to say about crap like this.

Baekhyun – Take You Home

Fuck this trash.  Where are the “bops”, I ask you?  WHERE?  Oh shit, I just used the word “bop”, brb kms.

Yesung – Hibernation

The other SM Station release is crap too.  SM Station has been nothing but boring shit so far this year.  Where’s Hitchhiker when you need him.

Daze – Friday

This guy actually went to London or some shit so he could wander around dirty streets and look boring.  I guess he didn’t want anyone back at home to find out that he was making this trash music.

Double K ft. M – Green Wave

This group is literally “KK ft. M”.  Similar levels of imagination have seemingly gone into the music construction.

Coco Avenue – Eottae

I get why people want to support this group, but the fact is it’s not their skin colour preventing them from living their dreams, it’s their music.  There’s already 23503 R&B groups that sound exactly like this in Korea and another 89821 in America.

Seo In-a – Apdiero

Finally we get to see the guitar player who cuts all those distorted guitar solos on all those trot songs.  I always imagined it was a guy who looked like this.

Soyeah – To My Star

For some reason the comments are all about Jonghyun, but I have no idea why and after listening to this I can’t be bothered researching.

Pre’Melo – How About

How about no.

Romantic Punch – Moonwalk In Kyoto

It’s always funny to me when people play on instruments that aren’t plugged in.  If only they left everything else unplugged in the studio too.

Sweet Revenge – Fly High

Another example, but in this case the girls look so non-committal and polite playing their instruments that I really want to see live footage of them now just so I can confirm their actual existence and that this isn’t just a bunch of models being paid to wave their arms across the strings and gyrate a bit.

Andup – What You Gon’ Do

I’m gon’ include this in roundup and then I’m gon’ say it’s a piece of shit so hopefully y’all aren’t gon’ waste your time listening to this trash.

Yasu – All I Wanted

Sorry I don’t have any witty response for this one, the song is just boring and that’s it.

Esther – I Feel Like Crying

Unlike most “this is live, no really” k-pop footage there’s a fair chance this is actually live, because the level balancing isn’t that great.

Maktub ft. Lee Lejoon – Because It’s You

On the other hand this one definitely isn’t live because there’s no reason why you’d use a hand-held dynamic microphone for vocals in a studio setting when you don’t have to.  I know I’m dodging the musical content here but that’s because 57 songs just like this come out every week in Korea and I have nothing to say about any of them.

Bursters – Wherever You Are

Not much bursting happening here, I’m afraid.  Move along.

Jerastar – The Dream In Dreams

Okay, so this is why vocalfaggotry needs to die, all you vocalfags who lurk on my posts please get the memo.  This is a perfectly good song but people aren’t appreciating it just because they can’t get their head around the non-R&Bish non-wanky singing – even though the vocal delivery is quite acceptable and pretty much standard delivery for any 80s pop.  Sure, some of you who run and participate in these sites are smart folks who can overlook superficial aspects and do grasp the bigger picture of the song being good (or not), but the vocalfaggotry trend in popular culture is very unhealthy as it inflates the importance of superficial details that have never mattered less, and ruins music for a lot of people.  Imagine being a music fan who suddenly can’t appreciate music because you’ve been told to listen to it a certain way, and now you can’t get that certain way out of your head.  Before you know it, k-pop has become a fossil like jazz, which was once party good-time music but these days if you see a jazz group you actually get told off by stuffy academics if you make too much noise while the band is playing.  The funniest thing about all of it is that as an audio engineer I can assure you that k-pop is so electronically generated that if the producers wanted this song to sound like some vocalfag-pandering trash, they could have easily achieved this with software, but they didn’t do this because they didn’t want to.

SPECIAL BONUS RETRO SONG

Nine Muses – Ticket

This song didn’t make a huge impression on me back in the day due to the sheer amount of quality k-pop that was coming out when it was released, but if someone released this today it would get my attention very quickly, just for the fast tempo alone.  K-pop these days seems to be almost afraid of anything with a quick tempo, most high-profile comebacks are mid-paced tropical shithouse or limp retro rap stuff and that’s if you’re lucky and it’s not another fucking ballad.  If the powers that be in Korea want another Hallyu wave, they need to spend a bit of energy on promoting punchy, fast, powerful music that breaks through cultural barriers and demands attention.  Surely they can only learn from the most relevant nine-member girl group in k-pop.  And yeah just like you guys I’ve got a gut feeling that whatever these girls went through is probably at least as harrowing as Melanie’s experiences in ChoColat, let’s hope one of them is also brave enough to talk to Kpopalypse one day.

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That’s all for this week’s roundup – more next week!