Song Review:: BABYMONSTER: DRIP- CLIK CLAK {Pre-Release}

• Release date: 2024 November 1

• Album tracklist: CLIK CLAK; DRIP; Love Maybe; Really Like You; BILLIONAIRE; Love in My Heart; Woke Up In Tokyo; FOREVER; BATTER UP (Remix)

• Album runtime: 28 minutes

 Well, well, well. This is awfully ambitious of YGE to have the rookie group drop a full album this soon after debut. Hopefully that becomes a trend and we get more full albums from groups again. However, we also have G-Dragon having contributed to the title track, so that's very, very exciting. Good to see he's still friendly with the company that he worked for for over a decade. And the turn around time between pre-release and album drop is also surprisingly small.

Unfortunately, as excited as I am for the album and wish I could support the full album part, I can't, and if you've read any of the similar posts, you can probably guess why. The maknae was fourteen at debut and turned fifteen this year. That's too young. So, I have to wait, which is a shame because the little I've already heard of their music, I might like. But that's the good thing about the internet. I'll still be able to find it in a few years.

And I'm putting it up front. I like what the members themselves did. I do not blame them at all for the song. They did good work with what was given to them.

The instrumentals doing that dripping thing, given the title of the album and the title track, is both funny and very on the nose. We have another example of a skittering beat, which provides an interesting contrast with the droplets. Normally, the lack of an established bass or low percussion to provide the counterbalance to everything else unmoors the song, at least a little, but here, because there's a sense of weight to the droplets, it doesn't have quite the same feel. There's unfortunately a lot of repetition that builds in the wrong way with the addition of the siren. The instrumentals are all up in the higher notes with nothing to hold it down, and even the weight of the droplets isn't enough. And then it gets higher. And even though there is a single lower pulse to the instrumentals, it's very much not nearly enough to stem the onslaught. The instrumentals are triggering my ADHD in a really big way, and I really do not like it. The last 30 seconds of the song, however, the pressure eases up because we get some lower, faster beats that almost manage to do something as everything changes to a club beat with the last 20 seconds. I can handle the last 20 seconds. The last 20 seconds are good. They're rambunctious and while they also have a lot going on, it has become a fun party song, and I can jam with that, and also wish that more of the song were like the last 20 seconds. But they cannot save the song.

This song is all rapping, which is fine. I don't know rapping as well as I do singing, but from what I can tell, they're all good at it. None of them sounded amateurish, and I did like the tone of some of them, particularly the higher pitched rappers. It was interesting. I likely would have liked their rapping with a different back track.

But the lyrics. They get their own paragraph away from the sound of their voices. This is one of the exact reasons why I don't typically listen to rap or hip-hop in English. I can tolerate some amount of grammatical errors with songs for the same reason that I can tolerate some amount in poetry, because I recognize that neither of them are a form which require complete sentences. But I myself still require there to be the skeleton frame of correct grammar, and not just words thrown haphazardly together in a collection as though meaning can be derived through the merest association with each other, rather than by crafting meaning and understanding through careful choice of words. I wish this wasn't in English, because then I could feign ignorance. Topic aside (and from what little I could glean from the onslaught, it reminds me a little of a PG version of Lisa's Money), I'm left legitimately wondering a) who wrote the lyrics and b) who approved them for production, because no. And, just to be clear, I'm placing 85% of the blame for the quality of the lyrics on whoever said this was good, and 15% on the writers. The members are not at fault for this at all. 

I'm watching that music video exactly once for this entire review. If I do it again, it will have to be muted with no captions, because I can't. The black and white was an interesting choice, and I actually like it a lot. We didn't get to see much choreography, if any, but considering the styling of the music video is more western, where choreography is a lot less important, that's a feature, not a bug. The same transition at the last 30 second mark that is audible in the instrumentals, marks a shift in the visuals as well. I do actually like the music video. The members did a great job.