Winning '11: 16 - Girls' Generation (SNSD)

Girls' Generation (SNSD) - Girls' Generation

For half a year now I’ve been one of those pulling the strings behind the Singles Jukebox machine (that’s a really mixed metaphor, isn’t it?) when it comes to what songs we cover. One of the things I’m most proud of doing (though at least as much credit goes to the far more knowledgeable Edward Okulicz and Frank Kogan) is introducing regular coverage of Korean pop music. Our writers have gone on to do a great job with it. We gave a sneak preview in our review of After School’s “Bang!” last year and South Korea has been where a lot of the most exciting things in pop-as-genre have been happening in 2011 – 2NE1’s fearsome bosh, Dal*Shabet’s glittery exuberance, HyunA’s self-explanatory “Bubble Pop”.

However, my limited experience with K-pop albums has found them either non-existent (ditched in favour of a sequence of mini-albums) or deeply disappointing, generally full of laboured ballads that bear no resemblance to the singles material. Girls' Generation actually released an uninspiring new Korean album of their own in 2011, The Boys, but they also released one which breaks the trend. This self-titled Japanese release is easily the most dubious 2011 album in my whole list, given that many of its songs are a couple of years old, but there are some new ones and they have all been rerecorded in Japanese, so I'm having it. (Listening in Japanese is a slight improvement from Korean because it makes the occasional fragments of comprehension more evenly spread than just getting the English bits. Also I can enjoy lyrical constructions like 'risky な business'). It doesn't seem right to leave out an album so addictive which seemed so new and which I kept returning to.

Girls' Generation are actually well suited to the album format anyway. They are less fearsome, glittery, or bubbly than a lot of the other groups, but they have a more adaptable, slightly more lasting strength which stretches across all of the songs and their many, many hooks and production tricks. They tend to use nine voices at once (if at all) not as overpowering force but as a rounded sound that you can’t hear a flaw in.

“Gee” is the song you’ll have heard of if any, taking sounds you’d associate with pop ballads and subverting expectations to turn them into an incredibly catchy thing of sweetly nagging insistence. My favourite is "Hoot" with its surf guitar verses, electro exclamations and towering choruses leaping off each other's backs to ever greater heights. I love the C64 beats of "You-Aholic" and "The Great Escape" too, and "Run Devil Run" and its big brassy warning of a chorus. In fact, I could easily make a case for the particular greatness of at least 10/12 of the tracks, which is quite something given the low rates for anything similar in sound.