Song Review:: KARD: Where To Now? (Part.1 : Yellow Light)- Tell My Momma

•  Release date: 2024 August 04

• Album tracklist: Waste My Time, Tell My Momma, Boombox, SHIMMY SHIMMY, SPIN, Tell My Momma (Inst.), Boombox (Inst.)

• Album runtime: 22 minutes

 Doing these has made me aware of a lot more groups, and with the majority of groups debuting being either boy groups or girl groups and only a small fraction of the debuts being co-ed, that makes me want to support the co-ed groups a little more. So, given that, I'm going to go back to August 2024, when I was first starting this, and hadn't exactly put KARD on my radar yet. I was familiar with their existence because of BM and Dive Studios, but they weren't a group that I was necessarily fully paying attention to. So, I plan to rectify this.

And bless them, they included the instrumental so I can focus on that instead of trying to discern it under or through the voices. I really appreciate when groups do this. There's something rather old and sentimental about the instrumentals, which I attribute to the warbling and the instruments being used at the beginning, both of which are something that you find in older recordings that had to be done on records rather than digitally or even cassettes. And then if you have a record player that doesn't work quite right as well, those turn into demonic screeching. I'm definitely not speaking from experience, and it's definitely not one of the reasons I attribute a lot of older music to horror even if there's no reason for it. But the introduction of the percussion line takes the instrumentals away from the definitely not horror music-esque and creates a different texture to the song.

And now I'm thinking a little of creepy dolls. That's okay because the vocals don't stay in creepy doll territory for too long, and the auto-tune on the men also helps with that as well. I really like their timbres, and how well their voices are supported. But it also feels like the melody of the song is in a fairly narrow band without much variation, and combined with the fairly repetitious instrumentals creates the feeling of wheels spinning in mud. There are also points where the instrumentals almost overshadow the voices, which I don't particularly like. 

I laughed a little seeing that the four of them are all basically platinum blonde. The four of them are genuinely gorgeous too, although blonde looks a little weird on them. Could just be me. Maybe that's the normal state for them. There's definitely a nostalgic overlay to the music video, looking at the color saturation or lack thereof, that feels very late 60s/early 70s. Also, and it took me a moment to figure out why something was bothering me about just looking at the video itself, but I think the aspect ratio it was shot in is also along those retro lines. If I had to guess, I'd say it was filmed in 3:4, which is so far from what we normally see anymore that it took me a full minute to identify that was what felt off. So, yes. This song and its accompanying music video fully embrace the retro to varying degrees. I'm not overly enthused by it other than seeing these things, because it doesn't feel like a connected storyline, nor does it feel like it's meant to be a slice-of-life genre, but it's very pretty. I do think that there's supposed to be a storyline, and there might be a small one, but it's neither obvious nor strong enough to compete with how pretty the music video is.