It’s time once again for Kpopalypse roundup – let’s check out this week’s new releases!

GUEST REVIEWER: BETSY

Asian Junkie blogging refugee and fellow fun-loving satanic caonima Betsy returns to add her throwdowns on all the new songs to the weekly Kpopalypse roundup!  If you’d like to get to know Betsy better (and who wouldn’t), she won’t have Twitter for a while because Twitter are caonimas, but you can connect with her on Instagram if you consider yourself worthy (spoiler alert: you’re not, but she might take pity on you if you’re lucky).

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Girls’ Generation – All Night

BETSY: NCT 127 B-side, and don’t tell me otherwise if you haven’t listened to their B-sides. NCT are the SM guinea pigs, you have to expect some other SM groups donning their colour too.

KPOPALYPSE: It’s good to see that the most important once-nine-members k-pop girl group has finally come back, but unfortunately so have Girls’ Generation.  Oh and by the way, it’s been moved to 3:34.  You’re welcome.

Winner – Love Me Love Me

BETSY: This is basically “Really Really” 2.0, and the only reason I liked “Really Really” was because sounded like they were saying “Willy Willy”, and thus it became my favourite song about penis. Anyway, I’m just glad that YG is moving on from the Vengaboys sound they’ve worn out with Big Bang and Ikon, it’s still very much a club song, just not a Euro-pop 2002 club song. 

KPOPALYPSE: The tropical shithouse has been toned down to a wet fart for this song and like all wet farts, if you have to force it, it’s probably shit.

Gfriend – Love Whisper

BETSY: Pretty disappointing. I thought their previous nostalgic songs where meant to be in a “trilogy”, that seems like fake news now.

KPOPALYPSE: While the rest of k-pop crawls up its own ass latching onto whatever tired pop music fad just fell out of fashion in the USA, Gfriend just keep being Gfriend.

CLC – Where Are You?

BETSY: I fucking love this, and I’m not sure why? I think spooky MV sold it to me. I am officially a CLCist.

KPOPALYPSE: Let’s hope “shitty 80s slow ballad with too much sax and reverb” doesn’t become a thing in pop music again.  Oh wait, it is?  Kill me now.

Nine Muses – Love City

BETSY: This song is my new gay anthem. I’m suddenly a Keumjo supremacist. 

KPOPALYPSE: Yes that’s right cunts NINE MUSES are the only relevant one-nine-members girl group in k-pop and this is the comeback that everyone was looking forward to.

Shannon Williams – Hello

BETSY: Just your standard R&B pop track. Shannon is Welsh, it’s a shame that she’s not following the footsteps of Sir Tom Jones, Dame Shirley Bassey, Shakin’ Stevens, and Marina & The Diamonds. But I guess Korea hasn’t grasped the concept that not every singer is from America yet, just like Americans haven’t grasped that there are four countries in the United Kingdom, and one of them is Wales. 

KPOPALYPSE: The Britney Spears type look just doesn’t work for her at all.  Also quit messing up the (quite good) song with all that extra vocal.  Did JYP teach you nothing?

Apple.B – WooChuChu

BETSY: I’m in favour of this new form of butt slapping.

KPOPALYPSE: That weird moment at 1:17 where the song has a yolo coughing fit but the video doesn’t change at all.  It’s like when you leave the YouTube autoplay on and open a separate window and then some weird audio from the now-hidden first window cuts in that you didn’t expect and you spill cheesecake on your lap (or jizz, maybe).

Yoo Young Jin & Taeyong – Cure

BETSY: Okay I was scared with was going to sound like Coldplay post 2005, because that’s everyone’s nightmare these days. But it’s just seems like basic ballad pop song from the 90’s – think All Saints.

KPOPALYPSE: Your standard lighter-waving thing but these kids look too clean-cut to be carrying cigarette lighters.

Real Girls Project – Ping Pong Game

BETSY: Oh this is fun! This is basically TWICE and iOi if they had decent production and could sing. 

KPOPALYPSE: Speaking of Raina and disappointment, now that Orange Caramel are dead I guess it’s up to new groups to do the k-pop ping-pong concepts we all crave.

Samuel ft. Changmo – Sixteen

BETSY: This isn’t a bad debut(?), to be frank. He’s 16 and it’s fun, like it should be. It’s not fake deep. 

KPOPALYPSE: It’s that bullshit sound again, you know it.

The Rose – Sorry

BETSY: I know they’re trying to glam it up like Japanese Rock with their lace accessories, but it STILL SOUNDS LIKE COLDPLAY.

KPOPALYPSE: on the guitar amplifier centre stage rests an Epiphone Emily The Strange SG G310.  I own one of these pieces of shit, it’s a cool instrument but it sounds and plays like a dog.  A band I was in a while back cut a few songs in the studio using it as the main guitar.  The engineer couldn’t believe it, he said “that thing sounds like fucking sandpaper”.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant by him as a compliment, but we took it as one anyway, and although we had access to better sounding guitars for the session we kept using it just to annoy him.  The recording we ended up with sounded a bit shit as a result but it was worth it.

BONUS SONGS

Girls’ Generation – Holiday

BETSY: Shockingly underwhelming, thought it could be a perfect song for WJSN. At least the MV set is fun, got LaLa Land vibes. *shrugs*

KPOPALYPSE: Watching Girls’ Generation sing a song about having a holiday is like watching Vanilla Ice say he’s “from the streets“.  We all know they’ve worked 16 hours a day every day for 13 years.  Don’t sing about things you know nothing about, girls.

Winner – Island

BETSY: This is one of my guilty pleasures this week. I am sick and tired of hearing about KARD, but this KARD is being well-produced.

KPOPALYPSE: People have been whining about too much tropical shithouse this summer, but the fact is that Korean has been flogging this sound to death for the last 6 months non-stop.  It’s got nothing to do with summer and everything to do with k-pop producers having no ideas.

Exo – The Eve

BETSY: I heard that Henry wrote this song, and did the demo, so I had an automatic dislike to it. When listening, I’ve come to realise that I am very thankful for D.O/Suho’s vocals – you can barely hear Henry in the final mix. THANK YOU SATAN. 

KPOPALYPSE: Henry c o s p l a y s as an EXO member and this song is about the best that EXO are going to get working at this tempo.

Primary ft. Sam Kim, Esna – 42

BETSY: Yes, all females shit out flowers.

KPOPALYPSE: Being a really good producer sometimes just means you’re really good at imitating garbage and making it sound just as bad as the originals.

Primary ft. Car, The Garden – Night Flower

BETSY: What porn is this?

KPOPALYPSE: Don’t flatter yourself when someone sits next to you in the cinema when the whole place is empty and then starts jerking off, everyone knows that there’s only about three metres squared space in any cinema that is optimal fapping position.

Raina ft. Aron – Loop

BETSY: Knock knock, this is Aron’s conscience speaking… remember saying all that sexist stuff you said a few years back? Also kinda weird he’s featuring when he wasn’t on Broduce 101, and JR was the one called the “Nation’s Leader” throughout the show. Just seems a more logical step to have JR on the single than Aron. Anyway, basic coffee shop song.

KPOPALYPSE: I expected this to be musically pure garbage, and I was right.  What I didn’t expect was for Raina be replaced in the video by a blow-up Raina realdoll.  They didn’t quite get the puffy cheeks right, and the eyes are too far apart from each other, but I guess it’s a hard thing to do correctly.

Kyung Park – Wiped

BETSY: It’s something.

KPOPALYPSE: I love the comment I saw on this one “kyung could fart into the mic for 3min and I’d still say his song saved me lmao” – good to see people being honest with themselves about how they are so dumb and brainwashed that they will accept any old garbage as long as oppa is in it.  Realisation that there is a problem is one step on the road to sanity, folks.

Longguo & Shiyhun – The.The.The

BETSY: This track is fine, I just don’t like how quiet the vocals are. I don’t think they’re old enough to drink fake champagne either.

KPOPALYPSE: This is the producers squeezing every awful pop trend from the last five years into one song.

Loco ft. Sumin – Rewind

BETSY: This was super chill for a minute, then got too boring for me rip.

KPOPALYPSE: rap music in weird time signatures can get fucked.  All those artsy “boundary-pushing” Anticon dickheads have a lot to answer for.

Tritops – Zinnia

BETSY: I thought this group was dead like 4 years ago, what the fuck?

KPOPALYPSE: It’s so painful watching a bunch of kids who should be rocking out standing next to their dormant instruments and singing a shit ballad.  It’s like watching kids do their homework behind the bike shed instead of trying cigarettes for the first time.

ONF – On/Off

BETSY: I dunno who this ONF is. But this is how you do an Euro-pop song that doesn’t sound like the Vegaboyz that tries to pass it off as Hip Hop to half the world for 5+ years – it’s fresh. I might keep my eye out for them. 

KPOPALYPSE: They found a way to make tropical shithouse even worse, but making a harmonica do the toot-toot bullshit.  Harmonica is cancer.

U Sung Eun & Kisum – Jealousy

BETSY: Satan did good creating Kisum, and bringing her into this world. 100% still fancy her. The song would be boring without her.

KPOPALYPSE: I’ve given up on Kisum, she’s never going to go hard ever, is she.  Being a rapper specialising in this sort of music is like buying a V8 racing car just so you drive it to work and get stuck in traffic jams all day.  Wake me up when she does something like “Crazy Dog“.

Kris Wu – 6

BETSY:  This is the type of song I want to be played whilst on my deathbed. Reminding myself though all those sweet memories I’ve had, life is still bitter.

KPOPALYPSE: Why do they put the retro computer game elements in this.  Nobody who actually was there at the time and remembers how shit most of those games really were is going to listen to this.

Lako – Savage

BETSY: Alan Cumming, sweetie, is that you? I had to stop after 30 seconds.

KPOPALYPSE: That plastic bag in the back of the car is giving me ideas of how we can reduce Korea’s yolosweg rapper population.

N.Flying – The Real

BETSY: Thank you Satan for bringing this dead horse out the FNC dungeon and letting it live. I am so happy this band concept group doesn’t sound like Coldplay post 2005 (*cough* Day6 *cough*). I am so thankful that Digipedi stopped filming underage girls’ feet for a second, and have gone back to their Orange Caramel routes. What a great time to be alive. 

KPOPALYPSE: A day in the life of Asian Junkie – video version.

Jida ft. Rachel Lim – Blind

BETSY: Pretty sure this is an evangelical song?

KPOPALYPSE: Look at them trying to make the industrial wasteland look all cute and nostalgic and shit.  Believe it or not I’m not nostalgic for the times I spent in my youth playing in rusted-out pipes getting tetanus because there was no Internet to be an asshole on.  The grass is always greener on the other side of the contaminated soil.

Young Thugs Club – Hope You Like This Song

BETSY: The first guy needs to shave, wash his hair and grab a throat sweet. Omg, what the fuck is this song? Help these men pls.

KPOPALYPSE: I guess this is how you thug it in Korea – wear pink shirts and use Autotune while miming inside bland white buildings and wearing sunglasses indoors, while some girls wander around looking bored as shit.  Thug life, y’all.

GB9 – Joa

BETSY: Seems a little off-season???

KPOPALYPSE: It’s actually okay, I feel like I’m getting touch with my inner boring cunt.

Brady – Ella

BETSY: Okay, this is something I would listen actively outside of K-pop. I’m a sucker for trip-hop/ 90’s dream pop instrumentals.

KPOPALYPSE: This beat would be good with an actual song over it.  At least there’s a guitar solo and not some toot toot shit.

Jun Jin Hyeong – Calling You

BETSY: Literally sounds like every other R&B singer in Korea, at least maybe the instrumental is little more creative? But that’s a maybe. Plus he’s less ugly than Okasian, there’s an advantage.

KPOPALYPSE: The video is shot all blurry not as an artistic decision but because nobody could be bothered focusing the camera, it probably seemed like too much effort for this garbage.

Boheme – Love Sick Summer

BETSY: Pretty certain this person can’t sing.

KPOPALYPSE: Sometimes you’re ugly and your songs suck.  Everyone has their strengths though.  I bet this girl makes a mean pasta bake or something.

Lydo ft. Yllrock – Satellite

BETSY: Can we BURN autotune, pls world. When will Korean rappers realise how stupid they look with dreads or braids. 

KPOPALYPSE: This song reminds me of the music in Tokyo 42, which is a cool little computer game.  Unfortunately they ripped the sonic textures out of the game but forgot about the actual songs and just yoloshat over everything instead.

Very Very Good Life – Doremi

BETSY: No. I think the rhythm of their singing, on some parts, reminds me of the Beatles. So, no thanks.

KPOPALYPSE: How do these nugu groups afford such expensive gear.  Even the baby Taylor Swift version of a Taylor acoustic is like $700 here.

Othankq – Awesome

BETSY: That person is wearing a shower cap of a cucumber dog as a mask. I am speechless.

KPOPALYPSE: For those who don’t know, this guy is the producer and songwriter behind that group with the tranny member, Mercury.  I guess a whole bunch of holier-than-thou Redditors are now going to have a go at me for using the word “tranny”, but please explain to me how “tranny” is an insult and “trans” is the correct term when they’re virtually identical and mean literally exactly the same thing.  What is it about dropping the “s” and adding a “ny” that makes something bad all of a sudden?  Clearly the answer is “nothing except for what you make up inside your own head because you’re a worthless boring cunt who wants to feel important”.  If you want something actually REAL to be legitimately offended by, try the consistent use of guitarface in this video.

SPECIAL RETRO BONUS SONG

Psy – Right Now

BETSY: Right now is the only song I like from PSY. After this almost 70% of his songs have sounded the same to me. 

KPOPALYPSE: People always bring up this song as PSY’s best, and they’re right.  However what they’re wrong about is the other thing they also always bring up about PSY which is that his schtick has somehow changed since “Gangnam Style”, it’s pretty obvious from watching this video that it actually hasn’t.  PSY just rang out of good songs, that’s all.  Nothing more or less.

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