It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup!  Let’s check out some new releases!

Jimin – Hallelujah

For some people it’ll be “Puss” that they’ll always remember about Jimin but for me it’s the Gibson SG with the plushy capo.  She’s not even rocking any of the rock-chick style anymore.  All the “hey” chants in the world can’t stop this from looking and sounding like a square peg in a round hole.

Playback – Want You To Say

Poor Playback, getting lumped with a comeback after two years right in the middle of the tropical shithouse trend.  Crappy timing, they should sue their company for this.

Pocket Girls – Oppa Is Trash

I’m not sure about that weird hand-washing jig in the chorus, but everything else about this meets required standards.

Epik High – Home Is Far Away

More like epic snooze.

Epik High ft. Kim Jong Wan – Lost One

Actually a collaboration with a Nell member suits them perfectly, which tells you everything you need to know about Epik High this time around.

Yuju & Jihoo – Heart Signal

This is exactly how girls look at you when you’re playing in a band.  Everybody, learn an instrument and start a band.

Chunji & Eunja – Hold Your Hand

Failing that, at least join a crappy k-pop group, then once your career is on the skids your label will hire some Kpopalypse bias to be in your video and you can hold hands and think pure thoughts.  By the way this song has Eunha’s worst makeup and styling ever, she only looks good here at a certain angle like those street perspective illusion drawings.

Haea – Paris Party

Not much of a song but the sounds on it are cool even if they don’t add up to anything much.

Loona/Odd Eye Circle – Loonatic

Indescribably weird and great.  Maybe the Americans have the right idea about gun control after all, if this is the type of music that international arms cartels make.

Heyne & Minsoo – Love Is Blind

I’m not sure if love is blind but whoever wrote this song might want to hope that love is at least partially deaf.

BONUS SONGS

Apink – Orion

Not a very spectacular song but if it means that the Apink girls mostly hold still so I can fap it’s okay.  The makeup budget for this video to try and get these pushing-30 girls to look 19 is probably bigger than Apink’s touring budget.

CLC – I Like It

Everything is great about CLC except their music.  They just keep not getting it right which is a shame because I really want to stan them to annoy people but I just can’t get behind these crap songs of theirs.

In2it – Amazing

This song sounds like every other song ever right now.  It’s like that feeling you get about five minutes into any Hollywood action film where the main characters are established and you can pretty much go home and write the entire story from that point onward.

Gavy NJ – You Said You Were Happy

The longest continually-running female k-pop group in history doesn’t have any original members left, and they don’t have any songs either, which is why nobody cares.

Big Tiger Group – Sunset

Koreans are discovering jazz fusion.  God help us all.

Ali, Paul Kim – For Less Than A Month

Nice try with the 80s keys but the typical syrupy vocals just turn this into garbage.

Kang Areum – Your

This one is slightly better but embracing a bit of vocal subtlety instead of “let’s make sure we sing every note in our range that we possibly can so we can show off to everyone” would have helped a lot.

4Men – Break Up In The Morning

Fuck waiting for the morning, tonight is okay for a breakup.

The Koxx – Blister

Someone asked me a Shure 55 question the other day (amazingly people still have them after my post completely clarifying the important issue of Shure 55 usage) and it reminded me that I forgot about this song which is really quite good.

Cereal – Bakery

Fuck the actual song, that girl who sings is fucking cute.  More information please.

Young Cream ft. Blino – Banana

Looks at those girls.  They are just so “where’s my paycheck for putting up with this crap”.  I bet they just want to grab that trolley that guy is on and wheel it down a steep hill and let it go.

Today’s Weather – Don’t Ask Me If I’m Dating

When your band is actually that boring that you name yourself after the dullest conversation topic in existence.

Lee Joon – What I Wanna Give

Wow this is boring too, who would’ve thought.

Wheesung ft. Hash Swan – Aroma

Definitely a strong aroma coming from this one.

Yaeji – Drink I’m Sippin’ On

Someone linked me this because they thought I might like the girl.  Not my type at all actually, but even if she was I don’t think I’d return the calls of someone who made music like this.

Louie & Soyou – Monitor Girl

Even when Sistar had garbage songs they at least weren’t quite as nothingy as this.  This took me about five watches before I realised there was a holdup or something in it.

Killzagrams ft. Hash Swan – Coloring

When people type “lol’ they’re actually “laughing out loud” less than 2% of the time.  However this is a true LOL as I actually laughed out loud when the song started.

Samuel Seo – Off You

The video game Out Run was the start of the slow death of the video gaming arcades that dominated the 1980s.  Because Out Run was a car racer with a force-feedback steering wheel, arcades charged up to a dollar per game instead of the 20c to 40c that was standard at that time.  Then other arcade games followed suit, realising they could charge more for gimmicks rather than gameplay, and in under a year the inflation rate of arcades went up to 100%.  Soon people were paying $1 and even $2 per game for complete crap like After Burner and Space Harrier that was all razzle-dazzle with huge moving cabinets but no gameplay.  Soon nobody could afford the arcades any more, and it was okay because the games suddenly weren’t worth it anyway, a typical game of After Burner would only last about three minutes so after an hour in an arcade learning how to fly the damn thing you realised that you could have spent that money on a game for your home PC and played it as long as you wanted.  Of course there were overnight lock-ins but because the hydraulic systems for all the new bullshit games were too unreliable to last an entire 8 hours of continuous play without mechanical failure of some kind, plus the arcades didn’t want to dent their lucrative daytime draw, that started to die off too.  This music video gives me bad memories and Samuel Seo can fuck right off.

SPECIAL BONUS RETRO SONG

T-ara – Roly Poly In Copacabana

T-ara’s “Roly Poly” was pure k-pop feature track perfection, so there was really no need for a remix that removed half of the cool stuff (Qri’s intro, the cool production, dual melodies), nor a video of the girls wearing crappy “tablecloth” school uniforms from the 1950s before pornographers discovered the valuable connection between school uniforms and fap.  However it has to be said that Boram never looked closer to my mother than at this moment, and my mother even had a school briefcase that is identical to the ones that Boram and the other girls have in the promo pictures for this single.

I wish I still had the briefcase, which had my mother’s initials embossed on the front and everything.  Unfortunately one of my old cats peed on it a whole bunch of times and kind of ruined it so I think I threw it out, but then it wasn’t very practical, you could only fit like two books in there, so it just sort of sat around collecting dust anyway.  [EDIT: I found it!  I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out after all.  Pity it’s stained and smells like pee.]  Anyway this song is annoying to listen to because while it’s good, there’s no reason for it to exist when the far superior in every way original also exists, plus it’s also annoying to write about because remembering how to spell “Copacabana” is annoying brain busywork that could be spent thinking about Eunjung.

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That’s all for roundup this week – Kpopalypse will return next week with more new songs!