Song Review:: ATEEZ: Birthday- Birthday {Japanese}

• Release date: 2024 October 02

• Album tracklist: Birthday, Royal, Forevermore, Birthday - Instrumental, Royal - Instrumental, Forevermore - Instrumental

• Album runtime: 22 minutes

 So is it just a KQ thing to include the instrumentals on the Japanese releases and not the Korean ones? Because there are some of the Korean songs that I'd absolutely love to have the instrumentals for. Oh, well. I didn't listen to the last Japanese release with BE:FIRST just because the timing was bad, but ATEEZ apparently enjoyed working with them on Hush Hush because I see that one of their three songs on this single joins forces with them again.

Maybe it's because I just watched ONEUS perform Kick It on Ace of Ace, but this sounds like an NCT 127 song, especially that opening. Although I have to acknowledge that the flute warble in the intro sounds really familiar and it sounds like a movie, and not NCT 127. I'm not sure which movie, because I can't place it, but that is a movie sound. Indiana Jones, maybe? Oh, that is going to bother me. I'm actually really happy that the flute wasn't relegated to only the intro, and that in that respect, the instrumentals sound a lot like Work, though the wind instrument there was an oboe. One could in fact argue that Birthday is the love child of Kick It and Work. I don't know what BE:FIRST sounds like on their own, and maybe they're the reason for the NCT sound, even though this isn't the song they were on.

Returning once more to Kick It, I keep expecting to hear "Bruce Lee" in the chorus, which up until this morning, I thought was the word "boomslang," as in the snake. That's on me, though, for not actually looking up the lyrics to that song. The whispering is an interesting choice, and that's the section that screams NCT 127. We have the Standard Jongho Note, which is always impressive, but part of me would like to hear him attack some lower notes with the same gusto. We get some lower notes from him, which is nice, but they aren't attacked. Also, I find it interesting that we have the line "Why so serious?" when one of the tracks for the xikers's Japanese debut is called Are you serious? and their title track is about going crazy, since that's the line most frequently attributed to the Joker. That line plus Hongjoong's laugh screams Joker. I feel like I'm reading too much into a connection between xikers and ATEEZ, assuming this is even lore related in either instance. Or maybe this is the first hint between a future ATEEZ/xikers crossover. Who knows?

I know I said that last part as a joke, but after having watched the music video, I'm thinking there's some substantiality to it. I'm also aware of the fact that apparently KQ has a cloning machine in the basement because xikers are so incredibly similar to ATEEZ, but whoever that is at :19 looks exactly like Hunter from xikers. 

Bear with me. I think I'm about to go down a rabbit hole...pun not fully intended. So in the xikers's universe, they canonically have the ability to cross barriers that others can't and also have trickster goblin powers that they don't exactly use responsibly all the time. We also know in the Ateez universe that last we left the crew, they were dealing with coming home and their trauma and not being heroes in real life like that, but some of them were looking for a Cromer. I think. I'm still working on their lore. This music video is Alice in Wonderland themed with a healthy dose of The Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz was actually where my brain went first because Wooyoung on the bike in the storm is irresistibly reminiscent of  Mrs. Gulch, the awful neighbor who tries to take Toto. And after that, we have Hongjoong with the weird, furry hat (kind of reminds me of a cross between the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter) and Mingi with the Unbirthday Party, Mingi who has also had a hat thing from Work where he was Mingi Wonka. What do both Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland have in common? Apart from being over a hundred years old.

They're both stories about leaving the normal world and going to one with magic with weird rules. In the case of Alice in Wonderland, it's a world with hyper-logical rules. Universe Z, to my knowledge, is science fiction, not fantasy. Xikers's world has magic, goblin magic, and, again, they specifically have it in their lore that they can cross boundaries others can't, and they also have been shown to be able to pull other people into their liminal space where magic works best for them. 

And I could be completely off base about this. But the music video for Birthday sparked the analysis part of my brain. Now, some counter-arguments. These are two lore extensive groups that are producing lore at the same time and from the same company. There is likely going to be some similarities, depending on directors and storyboard artists and "showrunners", which I think Eden has his hands in both groups, and I know Hongjoong did for a while. The fourth mini album from xikers was the first one he didn't help with. So having similarities is entirely expected, especially since the music videos for both Birthday and xikers's Tsuki (Lunatic) have similar minimalistic styles. 

Wow, I did not mean to get that into analysis. I apologize for that.

I also like Royal and Forevermore a lot more than I like Birthday, so there's that. They're also a lot longer than Birthday.