Song Review: BABYMONSTER – Moon

There’s something to be said about promoting your entire album with music videos, but there’s also a reason why some songs are meant to be b-sides and some are chosen as singles. In BABYMONSTER’s case, it’s a matter of personal taste. I didn’t care for title track CHOOM at all, but the summery sounds of I Like It appealed to me. Unfortunately, when it comes to Moon we’re back to dull territory. There’s nothing horrible about this song. In fact, the production is often quite engaging. There’s a crispness to the instrumental that’s very satisfying and the dynamics are robust enough to offer a sense of fullness that works well. However, there’s just not much of a song attached to the track. This approach is par for the course in modern pop songwriting where vibes take precedence over drama and excitement, and it leads to a rather flat-sounding product. Songwriting — in both K-pop and global pop — has fallen into a highly repetitive series of predictable flows. This phrasing tends to act in lockstep with truncated melodic lines that feel more conversational than melodic. I could list a hundred (thousand?) songs that fit this description, and they tend to feature structural monotony as ...