B.A.P Make Their Best Comeback To Date, Rainbow Do Not
After going through a K-pop drought that lasted several agonizing days, we’ve suddenly gotten comebacks from B.A.P, Rainbow, and even NU’EST, who finally managed to release a song that doesn’t suck. But while NU’EST’s new single is quite good, B.A.P’s is freakin’ awesome.
After pulling a “Shy Boy” on the deliriously addictive “Stop It,” B.A.P have returned to their aggressive bad boy image and the quaking hip-hop sound of “Warrior.” Their new single, “One Shot,” is huge and heavy, with a hook that sounds like it was custom-made a sports commercial. It’s an anthem, like all the drama, angst, and swag of the group’s previous singles has been crammed in together to create the ultimate B.A.P hit.
The blockbuster music video takes a page from T-ara’s gun totin’ “Cry Cry” and “Lovey-Dovey” mini-dramas, with a complicated plot that features plenty of violence and a twist ending. TS Entertainment reportedly spent over $900,000 on it, and you can tell; it’s a movie quality music video. The slick quality is most appreciated when my boo Bang Yong Guk wears a tank top, revealing his flawless twig arms that I want around me, ASAP.
And obviously, with this being a B.A.P video, the choreography is off the chain. I don’t know how these guys have been doing all this hardcore shit for over 12 months straight and not broken something or died from exhaustion.
So fucking good.
After praising B.A.P to the high heavens, I now have to semi-drag Rainbow — a group I was really rooting for.
Last month I wrote a piece for Popdust about how badly Rainbow have been mismanaged throughout their career, and that they better pull out something seriously amazing for their first K-pop comeback in over a year-and-a-half. And yeah, they totally didn’t. Their long-awaited comeback single, “Tell Me Tell Me,” is a bubbly slice of K-pop that could easily pass as an AOA single. It’s not bad, and the cute concept actually suits Rainbow more than some of their old sexy concepts did, but again, the whole thing is no better or worse than any AOA single. That might be acceptable for some groups, but it isn’t for Rainbow. These are the same girls who released “A” and “Mach”, easily two of the most mesmerizing pop singles of the past five years. Even “To Me,” which could never possibly live up to the perfection of Rainbow’s work with Sweetune, was still an utter knockout.
“Tell Me Tell Me” could be forgiven if Rainbow were making three comebacks a year and wanted to switch things up by trying something cute, but it’s not okay for them to return with something this innocuous after so long out of the spotlight. I mean, “Candy Girls” was better than this, and that wasn’t even released as a real single.
Since Rainbow’s new album, Rainbow Syndrome, is apparently just part one of something bigger, we can only hope that “Tell Me Tell Me” is just a warm-up before they bring out the big guns on their next single. If not, DSP needs to just forget it and give us the saucy Sweetune-produced Jaekyung solo debut that K-poppers everywhere have been waiting years for.
