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Music Show Wins:: Week of 03/11 - 03/17

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  We're almost finished with the first quarter of 2026! How is everyone feeling? Good still?  We've got girl group dominance this week for the wins, including a first win for a song! Whoop! So for the After School Club re-run, I grabbed an early episode, ep. 22 from 2013 featuring the boy group History! (side note, that sequence of groups is a little incredible because you have NU'EST, then History, then BTOB, then BTS). And I picked that clip to go as the embedded video because you get them singing a capella. For the The Show re-run, I went with Verivery from 2021 and the extra stage is from Show Champion for the OnlyOneOf subunit QQQ, which debuted recently! I also decided to include an old stage from Show Champion because I ran into it and the choreography is both adorable and hilarious, but their voices send me. But since we were thinner on the recent stages, I'm giving you that extra one. As always, the links down in the spreadsheet go to my reviews of the songs an...
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Song Review:: AB6IX: SEVEN : CRIMSON HORIZON- BOTTOMS UP

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Release date: 2026 March 16 Album track list: Given, BOTTOMS UP , Forever, So Sweet (0522), Pieces of Youth, Holiday, Sometimes, Your Tomorrow, Faded Trail, Side by Side, Endless Album runtime: 37 mi nutes  That is a lot of capital letters. I'm not just shouting at you. You know what's really funny? One of these members is in the Greatest Hits post I'm going to drop here soon. I did not plan that deliberately; it's simply one of those funny happenstances. Anyway, this group is wildly talented as well, and I've got a soft-spot a mile wide for several of them. And we have an average of almost three-and-a-half minutes per song for the album, which I am stoked about. And it looks like the members potentially have solo songs folded into the album! One of them is the member I was just referring to! He is not the eldest, though, who is going to need to enlist this year, so that's where this group is at. And their seventh anniversary is also coming up in a couple of mon...
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Song Review:: ALL(H)OURS: NO DOUBT- DEAD MAN WALKING

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Release date: 2026 March 16 Album track list: NO DOUBT; DEAD MAN WALKING ; Piece of Me, 7 o'clock (Kunho, Youmin, Minje, ON:N); Cause I'm Insane (Youmin, Xayden, Masami, Hyunbin); My Spring, My Light, My Breath Album runtime: 17 mi nutes  This song is barely two and a half minutes long, which is atrocious for a title track, but if the first track on here was a slightly more reasonable length, this whole thing would have cleared the three minute average I want to be seeing.  The beginning of the song is promisingly dramatic, and then it shifts to heavy electronic music with some added choral emphases to the beat. The whole thing screams boss fight in a video game, especially something from like Devil May Cry or Castlevania , a supernatural action adventure. The story beats are clear in the instrumental, and it's making me really excited to see the choreography. There are power chords, for crying out loud. This song has a lot of things going on vocally. We've got vocal f...
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Song Review:: NouerA: POP IT L!KE- POP IT LIKE

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Release date: 2026 March 10 Album track list:  POP IT LIKE , Silhouette, A-LIST, We are young Album runtime: 11 mi nutes  I missed doing their last one so I have to make sure that I do this one. Maknae is eighteen now, so if you only listen to groups where everyone is eighteen and older, you can now listen to them! I was not expecting for the cowbell to be as front and center as it is. It's not in the entire song, which would be excessive even for me, but it does spend a lot of the not quite three minutes with the cowbell. I'm also annoyed that we got such a lovely, more traditional sound at the beginning, and then it changes the genre and we never get that back. What do we get instead? Sirens, both of the alarm and police variety. I think that is a weak exchange, personally, but others are welcome to disagree with me. We do also get the Mario coin sound effect, or maybe that's the Sonic ring sound effect. Either way, it's an addition I wasn't expecting. Other than ...
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Greatest Hits:: RM (BTS): Wild Flower

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 I hunted through his discography for a song that would match what I wanted this post to do. For a number of reasons I'll get into in the next post, even though this will be posted on NU'EST's anniversary, I'm not doing one of theirs then. Instead, I wanted to do an RM song because BTS has an album coming out in the next week and I wanted to honor the friendship between the two groups, and because I finally get to pull JR's photocard off my enlistment wall next week as well, I wanted to do RM specifically. Both of them are rapper leaders, neither of them is the eldest member of their group. They debuted around the same time, they're both Kims, they're less than a year apart in age, and because their groups had near-disbandment-causing struggles early in their careers, they have that connection as well. And they ended up being at the same company, technically, when HYBE bought Pledis. You can actually see the spike in sales for NU'EST because RM would not...
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Song Review:: Dragon Pony: RUN RUN RUN- Oh Perfect!

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Release date: 2026 March 10 Album track list: Palm Lines, Oh Perfect! , Zombie, Rehearsal, Hidden,  Album runtime: 16 mi nutes  There is a song called "Zombie" in this mini album. I hope that this one gets a music video that is appropriately spooky to add it to my Halloween playlist because that's really all I want in life. Anyway, I kind of love this band and even though I'm a little bit behind on my reviews for the month, I want to make sure I hit this one because they need the love and attention. They're a pretty solid band. That's a strong opening for the song, and the instrumental as a whole takes advantage of a stereo audio system, because I can hear it in the instrumental moving from right to left. The whistle, for instance, sounds like it's coming through mostly on the right channel. This song is for the "noise music" lovers out there, where it's not fully intense but there's enough happening that it's a little bit much for me...
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Song Review:: E'LAST: Tame

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Release date: 2026 March 10 Album track list: Tame Album runtime: 6 mi nutes  I wasn't even aware that they were dropping a single! And this is a single and not a pre-release, I'm pretty sure, but that's fine because this is one of those groups that regularly just hits my brain in exactly the right way. Dark Dream remains one of my favorite K-Pop songs, full stop. Will this one be as good as Dark Dream ? Let's see. And it's close enough to three minutes that I'm okay with it.  Well, this is promisingly dramatic. That guitar reminds me so much of Ash by Seventeen that it brings me joy. It's also a very specific kind of guitar that I just love in general, so there is that anyway. But there's a little bit of an EDM overlay to that guitar that I really appreciate. I hope this gets performed soon so that we can see the choreography, because I imagine that this is going to have really cool choreography. They sound so good. I wish I had the energy and time to...
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