"Ho" came out of nowhere and destroyed me. For such a short song, the affect of it is just totally annihilating. It's the feeling of unrequited love/lust, of knowing you'll never reach the person who means most to you. Drowning in misery and bitterness, paralyzed by yearning, lost in your own anguish. I spent months returning to this song in fits of abject despair. It seemed to embody my many years spent in romantic turmoil. That time of my life is over, but the memories of it are strong and insistent. That kind of pain never dies. It only weakens with time.
Perceptive Twitter followers will notice I've pulled a few moments from this video for my own profile...
A very tough choice between this and Kim Lip's Eclipse. What clinches it for me? Nothing more and nothing less than that double-time beat. A friend pointed out that I gravitate toward frantic music, and I can't argue otherwise. In this song especially, the pummeling beat imbues JinSoul's forceful vocals with an extra intensity. It all comes together before the chorus' last reprise. When it hits, you feel the accumulated passion that's been building the whole time. Like a head rush of infatuation, the effect is totally dazzling. As muted as the cool tones of the MV are, there's nothing restrained about the song. It just keeps crescendoing until you've joined JinSoul in a heightened state of bliss, only becoming cognizant of the rush after the song abruptly cuts out. This was my first encounter with the LOONA project, and I've been hooked ever since.
Kinetic, heavy, intense, frenetic. The percussion clicks and clatters while the rich bassline lurches back and forth. The jungle heritage really comes through in that interplay: you can soak up the lower frequencies or keep to the 140, whatever suits you best. Incredible production from Footsie as usual, and he brings the bars too: "Yeah man ah unruly can't be ruled, man ah unschooly can't be schooled, don't try pull the wool over my eyes nah fam I can't be fooled, I'm way too hot I can't be cooled..."
(Also, are those his parents in the video? They look just like him!)
Got this one onto the Singles Jukebox! For months now I've been obsessing over this intoxicating concoction. It's all in Bảo Thy's voice, never better than here: gentle and pleasant during the verses, acrobatic in the bridge, affectless through that whiplash chorus. Kimmese's verse is silly, but by the time she shows up, the song's settled into a joyously bouncy groove that carries things through. No need to get hung up on the words with such a crystalline instrumental. Then it's back to Bảo Thy, voice soft as ever despite the more insistent beat. Similarly, the video fluctuates between soft-focus warmth and scorching neon. It's lively enough for dancing yet mellow enough to savor at length. A total aesthetic experience, anchored by Bảo Thy's entrancing charisma. V-Pop mostly took the year off, but it could afford to with a release this good. Here's to another groundbreaking year of EDM in 2018! While the rest of the world goes chill, Vietnam continues to provide a much-needed energy to electronic music.
Past the farthest horizons of sound, affect, image, and human existence. Beyond all known categories of being. Deeper than the most cavernous chambers of emotion. A music video with few precedents, even within PUSSYKREW's extraordinary back catalogue (perhaps only this really compares).
I am totally overwhelmed by this video. Watching it is like experiencing the emergence of new forms of thought and feeling. It's the feeling of futurity Mark Fisher longed for, an absence so much music this past decade has been mourning. Yet here it is, as if it never left, as if it were here all along. I'd almost forgotten what it feels like.
We've been lost for so long that being shown the way back is destabilizing. But then they didn't call it "the shock of the new" for nothing.
**
Writing from February 2020...MONDO GROSSO's Labyrinth, a huge oversight, one I forgot because I made this whole list from memory, and thus was more prone to omissions. I've been keeping more careful track in the years since, but I can't believe I forgot this one. That opening shot of the twilit Chrysanthemum Complex may have been our single biggest impetus for our trip to Hong Kong in 2018. Hope you enjoy as much as we did.
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