Song Review:: NCT DREAM: DREAMSCAPE- When I'm With You

•  Release date: 2024 November 11

• Album tracklist: INTRO : DREAMSCAPE, When I'm With You, Flying Kiss, i hate fruits, No Escape, Best of Me, YOU, Heavenly, Night Poem, Off The Wall, Rains in Heaven

• Album runtime: 34 minutes

 This one is going to be posted a little later simply because I want to give a little bit of space between this one and the pre-release's review. But I'm also generally severely displeased with SME right now. I'm sorry. What do you mean you're going to release an album while the group isn't even in the country right now? I thought HYBE/Pledis was bad enough with dropping Spill The Feels and then shipping Seventeen off to the US. But at least they were in the country to do promotions for a week.

Dream, you have done nothing wrong. It's not your fault. Poor planning and management is at fault, which makes it your company's fault. Not yours.

My apologies. I'm just deeply frustrated with SME at the moment. Between this and Yuta's solo debut which as far as I can tell still hasn't been mentioned on the official SM twitter, it's really looking like SME can't even do the bare minimum of properly scheduling and promoting all of their artists right now.

Okay. Anyway. On with the song. 

The very beginning of the song sounds like a scratched CD playing in a portable CD player, which sends me back in time, and weirdly, I think that's the point of the song. I definitely could hear this sound from a boyband of the late 90s and early 00s and think it fits with that era, but it also bridges the gap with the brightness of recent releases to create something that I honestly think might age rather well. There's an unpretentious lack of ambition to the song that allows a certain timelessness, especially given the frequency of songs entitled "When I'm With You", but it also prevents it from having a section that really punches and stands out. Still, there are some interesting things going on. There's a certain sound in the instrumentals that again brings back the sound of a CD, only in that one's case, it's the sound of a disc stopping in the player, and there's another one that is very much 80s' laser sound effects. 

Their voices are very pleasant and soothing, which puts them a little at odds with the instrumentals, but ultimately there's nothing wrong with them. Their voices are very clean and polished for the most part, which does strip some personality from them, but the rap at the end gives some of it back. The vocals get another case of the scratched CD effect, and with the layering we get in the last minute or so of the song between the rapping and the singing, we get something that settle my over-active brain a little, which I always appreciate when I can find it. Still, it's also a lot, borderline too much, but I enjoy listening to the song enough that I want to keep listening to it. Again, the rapping is what sells the song best because it's less stripped and sanitized. I enjoy it. It's actually pretty nice.

This is actually a really cute music video, one that's equal parts adorable and whimsical. The glittery highlight that some of them are wearing is one of those things that makes it a little more fun visually, and there's also just a lot of fun to be had here. I wish they had more fun instead of just being good-looking, which they obviously are and would be even if they were having fun, but the music video also matches the song well-enough that it doesn't truly detract from what the audience is watching. The sparkly outfits are still my favorite though.