Cordavision Music Reviews

The Apple Music animated cover goes hard, not gonna lie. One of the biggest bands in the world, BTS, with adoring fans around the world, and I guess the music I’ve heard of theirs is okay for the most part. I’m relatively newer to the scene, joining in with 2019’s Map of the Soul: Persona EP, which is honestly pretty good. I haven’t heard most of their earlier works, which goes back to Wings. Personally, I think the best project I’ve heard from them is BE , but that’s just me. PROOF is a compilation album. I know, I know, but I honestly figured that this should be a good way to get more into their discography, alongside three new tracks. Let’s get into it. Since it’s a compilation album, this is a two-and-a-half-hour project we have here. Then again, I’m not complaining because I enjoyed what I heard for the most part. It was nice to hear a solo version of “Boy With Luv” that I didn’t know existed since the Halsey-featuring version was one of their first big radio hits in the U.S.. I...

This art kicks ass, for real. I’d kill for this physically for the art alone. So, here’s where I get to flex my K-pop knowledge. Girls Planet 999 is a reality competition show where they got 999 contestants from South Korea, Japan, and China with the intention that the final nine contestants would form a new supergroup and become titans in the South Korean music industry. In the finale, the winners were officially announced and became the group KEP1ER. After a couple of delays, they’ve finally released their debut EP with killer art, FIRST IMPACT . The project has already broken a massive sales record, with the first day sales being the highest in the history of Hanteo, South Korea’s equivalent to America’s Billboard. I know all that was a bunch of stuff to read, and I don’t blame you if it was a little boring, but this is a pretty big deal. So, let’s just get into FIRST IMPACT . This EP’s divided into two halves: three original songs and three made for the Girls Planet 999 show. Per...

I was gonna have a ‘society if ____’ joke here, but I just noticed the distortions on the wall and I can’t take my eyes off it. Well, TWICE is getting up there for me as one of my favorite K-pop groups. A good amount of their singles have that secret sauce that I don’t think any groups in K-pop can replicate right now, and that includes from this new album here. Their latest EP, Taste of Love , was pretty good, and when I was planning to review that, I just saw that they announced this album and just made a bite-size review for it instead. Now, they have just released their newest mini-album, Perfect World . Are they still that hit-making machine that they’re known so well to be in the industry? Let’s find out, shall we? I was talking with some friends about wanting some type of concept for this album and granted, I think it’d be cool for the group to go in that direction, but that really doesn’t happen here. I feel like “PIECES OF LOVE” would’ve been much more at home in Taste of Lov...

Somebody asked me who my bias was, and I didn’t know what they meant. I’m just trying to listen to music here, not which gender I’m attracted to. K-pop artists and groups have always been a touchy subject. Of course, it’s all the rage on Twitter, but I really don’t have a ‘bias’ like most of the K-pop stans. I always try to keep an open mind with this, and I’ve gotten quite a few Twitter DMs about my very few reviews on K-pop projects. I’ve listened to LOONA for a while now, and actually, they’re the group that got me into K-pop. So, I’ve got high expectations for whatever they do, and [&] is one of my most anticipated projects of the year because of that. Haseul, who had left the group due to mental health issues, is back on this. That may not seem like a big deal to people not in the K-pop scene, but it really is. Let’s get into [&] and see what’s happening here. Like their past projects, the group has always tried to keep it versatile with some peppier tracks and some slow...

Is this 'nu-disco?' YUKIKA is the best K-pop artist working right now. That may be a hot take in the K-pop community, but I can back up my claims. Her debut album, 2020’s Soul Lady , is my favorite K-pop project out of all of them at the moment, and the lead single from this project, “Lovemonth” is one of the best singles of the year so far. Once I heard there was a new project coming from YUKIKA earlier this year, I was super excited. If anything she put out next was on the same level as Soul Lady , this is gonna be insane. Now, we have that project in the form of timeabout, which is one of my most anticipated projects of the year. I’ll stop gushing so we can talk about timeabout, . The genre-mixing on this project is divine, honestly. Many tracks range from city pop to K-pop to a disco revival that’s modernized for the 2020s. For such a short project, the consistency of only six tracks is absolutely on point. Instrumentally and vocally, ESPECIALLY VOCALLY, YUKIKA fucking kil...

It goes without saying that there’s a new rising force in the music industry. K-pop has been slowly rising in popularity in America since 2012, and without PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” we most likely wouldn’t be hearing about groups like BTS. The septet has been gaining up popularity since their 2014 EP Skool Luv Affair , and it really came to a peak six years later with “Dynamite,” the lead single from this new album BE that was the first track by a K-pop act to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the chart’s history. BTS’s fan base, the ARMY, are some of the most dedicated fans in recent memory, sometimes to a fault, but I digress. BE acts as BTS’s ‘comeback’ album, which in the K-pop world, means that this is all new songs. This isn’t past material recorded in a new language, this is brand new content for their fans to dive into with a fine comb, but also a new way for new fans to enter. I really liked “Dynamite” when it released, and since there were no other singles to thi...

Blackpink is one of the biggest K-pop acts around the world, and it makes sense why they’ve been attracting these big names to this project. Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, David Guetta, and Cardi B all had their hand in this album’s creation, and their influences are shown quite a bit throughout The Album . Yes, the album is called The Album . I get why Blackpink named it this, it’s been highly anticipated for throughout most of 2020, and letting fans know that this is the thing they’ve been waiting for is a tongue-and-cheek thing to do. To me, though, it just seems like this is just going to be more Blackpink music. Technically it is, but I think they could come up with something better than The Album . Either way, this is a new album. Let’s just get right into it. The Album is a K-pop album with pop and rap influences. This first thing has nothing to do with the quality of the music, but is this really considered an album? This just feels way too short to be considered a full LP. Then...

I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge in genres of music that I’m generally not interested in. K-pop is one of those genres, and while I’ve been looking through Spotify and even Twitter to find some new releases or some that I missed, I came across YUKIKA. The only album listed on her Spotify page was her debut album which came out that weekend, Soul Lady . Since I had already listened to Taylor Swift and Logic for their respective reviews, I figured ‘what the hell’ and I hit play on Soul Lady . Here’s what I thought about it. Soul Lady is a K-pop record with heavy disco influences. Now, the best way to describe this record’s sound is its aesthetic. It’s like you’re walking through the big city on a night out with your friends, maybe in the 80s, maybe in the present (pre-pandemic, of course). Then, you see this certain someone. You don’t know how, but somehow, you feel connected. The chatter of everyone else around you, the thumping bass, everything fades away and all you can see an...

(Author's Note: ARMY, please forgive me if I mess up with your boys. I know your power, and I don't wanna make you guys mad, but this review isn't biased.) If you know about the music scene, BTS honestly needs no introduction. One of the biggest boy bands, if not the biggest, in all of music, the septet that consists of Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jungkook have been on the music scene since about 2010. Their debut single album being called 2 Cool 4 Skool officially released in 2013, and since then, they’ve grown a powerful fanbase called the ARMY, rivaling the fanbases of megastars like Ariana Grande or Shawn Mendes. Their pretty great album WINGS and the Love Yourself albums are what set them on the map (get it, map?) for me, and I’ve always been interested in the group’s dynamic and influence in the K-Pop genre. So, their latest record, Map of the Soul: 7 is a record that I was pretty excited to listen to. So, what did I think about it? In a word, it wa...