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.

Watch on YouTube

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.

( adjectives, arbitrary_greay's keybs, Euro-ish songwriters )

(My previous two posts entitled "After School's Good Year" are here: 2013 and 2012.)