Song Review:: Madein: SATURN

• Release date: 2025 February 07

• Album tracklist: SATURN, SATURN - Accapella, SATURN - Instrumental

• Album runtime: 7 minutes

 It does make me feel a little icky doing a review for a group that is having problems because they have an icky CEO. But I'm also willing to do it so that others are able to decide if they want to listen to it themselves. I'd be able to listen to them without issue otherwise because they debuted last year and the maknae turns eighteen this year, so she does fall within my rules for myself, but given the icky feeling, I think I'm going to treat this as though she wasn't old enough though, to minimize the amount of views or streams I contribute. And I get to split this up because the instrumental is included.

Acoustic guitar does a great job of contributing to the home-spun, lonely feeling at the beginning. I'm not sure that it necessarily needs to stretch on as long as it does, but the subsequent shift to intense science fiction warbling synth proves a strong palate cleanser from what would otherwise be a little too simplistic. And that's coming from someone who listened to predominately country music for most of her life and practically lived off the sound of the acoustic guitar. The different sections of the song are clearly delineated, which I do appreciate. The song doesn't have the instrumentals blended very well, so there are very much seams to the transitions, but I'm also curious to hear what that sounds like underneath the vocals. Hopefully, those seams work with the song rather than against it.

I'm going to listen to it once with the acapella track, so I get just the vocals, and then once with the actual song combined together to see how the two work together.

There isn't enough vocal layering and vocal tricks to justify an acapella track, even though I really appreciate its existence. They clearly have good voices, but there's too much time with just the individual solos to be able to stand against the weight of the silence. The parts where they have several voices harmonizing, whether by notes, words, or rhythm, are great and do an excellent job of showcasing that they do have good voices that work well with each other. But there's just too much silence underneath the solo voices. As an acapella track, because the song doesn't take the opportunity to really use their voices, I don't think it works. There are certain advantages to acapella, which is why some of my favorite non-K-Pop groups are acapella groups, but this song doesn't use those advantages, and I'm kind of sad for it, because where you do have the nice layering, it has so much potential. Alas. With the two combined into a single song, it works much better, which is as it should be. The sum of the parts should be greater than the parts individually. We should get at least five from 2+2, but I think that's as far as we go. We don't get six or seven. It's a beautiful song, and it does do what I hoped it would do with regards to the seams, but I also don't necessarily know that it was balanced to show off the voices as well as it probably could have been in post-production. There are spots where the vocals are soft and the instrumentals are a little too overpowering, and instead of being under the vocals to support them, it feels like the situation is flipped. So, that's unfortunate, especially since this is in fact such a beautiful song. 

There are a couple of things about this music video. One, it doesn't have a storyline, or if it does, it's subtle or barely there enough that I missed it. Instead, we have vibes and visuals. Maybe that's what I'll start calling this kind of music video, a vibes and visuals music video. They're absolutely gorgeous, and there's a lot of location storytelling, but that contributes to the vibes of the piece rather than any substantive storyline. Second, the music video fully contributes to the cold and lonely vibes of the song, and does an excellent job of strengthening those motifs. A lot of the different pieces work together really well to support this.