Battle of the B-Sides:: Pentagon: When I Was In Love

 Continuing with my July theme of "B-Sides From Artists I Haven't Covered Yet", I've only actually decided on the first three songs. I've got a doc that has a list of songs I kind of want to cover but am horribly indecisive about because I've switched July's setlist about four times now before I gave up. The doc is going to be a roulette wheel when it's time. So, if you've got a song for me, I've got a lot of room in the back two-thirds of the month for it and am happy to slot it right in there. The other solidified song is from an artist who is actually a pretty controversial figure, but also undeniably impactful on K-Pop as a whole. 

Pentagon debuted in 2016 under Cube Entertainment as a ten-member boy group. They're currently down to at most nine members, but until we get a comeback from them to clarify, I'm not sure exactly how many we have left. But they're not disbanded! And a lot of their songs were written by the members (many of them by the leader Hui, who we love here on this blog because someone (me) fell head over heels in love with his voice during a live he did).

When I Was In Love is the fifth and last track on their mini album DEMO_01, released in 2017. The sole producer and composer for the song is Hui (Wanna One, Boys Planet, Triple H, Produce X 101, JO1, BVNDIT, NOWZ, VANNER, VAV, COX, Shinhwa, Han Yo Han, and Hanbyeol). He also was a lyricist for the song, as were fellow members Yuto (i-dle), Wooseok (Wanna One, i-dle, Kim Donghan, KIK, 0WAVE), and Dawn (formerly known as E'Dawn, which is what we'll be referring to him as throughout this) (HyunA, NCT, Wanna One, Triple H, Chanyeol, GEMINI, DeVita, Park Bom, Groovy Room, DEMIAN, NEWBEAT, Dynamic Duo, and TraxX). That's it. This song was fully written by members of the group.

I have a music video with this one? Nice. It's only a partial music video because this is only two minutes long, but it's more than a lot of b-sides get. This short film reminds me of the episode of A Korean Odyssey where the kids are getting trapped in the books. I tried to be vague about it, in case you haven't seen the nine-year-old drama, but the vibe is the same. 

So as an interesting note, I'm looking through the search results on YouTube and there are a lot of translations into Spanish for the fan-made color-coded lyrics, so that's actually an interesting indication of the demographics of fans that love this song.

Anyway, full song. You're getting a color-coded lyric video (not one of the Spanish translation ones, although I will link one somewhere) right off the bat for the audio because this is delightfully difficult to find the official audio for on YouTube. 

Y'all, I cannot wait to check out some of those live performances of this song because I want to know who all is singing those harmonies. Hui is doing the ad-libs there at the end, but the regular harmonies that interrupt the chorus lines are stunning. (This color-coded lyrics video tells me that it's often Yeo One paired up with Yan An, Hui, or Jinho, which is apparently a better translation as well, but I'd already gone through most of this section using the above embedded video and I like that the one I embedded has the members in that order, which looks more age-order than the one with the better translation.) 

Okay, so we all wanted a sad, crying-at-3-AM-while-eating-ice-cream-directly-from-the-container song, right? That's what we wanted, right? I haven't done a song this sad in ages. But I've also said that we love a man who yearns, and E'Dawn's opening lines at :24 set that stage for the rest of the song beautifully, love and loneliness existing at the same time. And Shinwon at 2:39, which his low, breathy, almost despairing voice with just the piano behind is such an abject vocal image of misery, is paired so exquisitely with Hui's clear vibrato and soaring soprano notes during the bridge that it creates a beautiful and delicious contrast.

And I call them soprano notes because his falsetto is working overtime at 3:00 and hitting notes that have me in my falsetto. 

Across the board though, even in the studio recording, the vibratos are vibratoing. All seven of the vocalists are showing off at least some with their lines, no matter how short those parts are. For example, as expected of someone who had debuted with SM's ballad project group, Jinho's vibrato rumbles through his part at :58 in its entirety, and Yan An, who only has a single line at 3:07 backed by Hui's ad-libs, has his vibrato only quivering a little at the end of the words that are on held-notes.

The rappers are settled in with the beautiful melodic rapping that you see often in BTOB songs as well as in BEAST songs, Yuto even getting some stylistic autotune applied to his part. That style of rapping grounds the vocals well as a ballast, especially because there are some sections of the song with high notes sharp enough to cut glass, and just makes for a song that gets the contrast between the highs and the lows (which could also be a representation of how you feel after a break-up, where when you're happy, you're happy, but when you're sad, you're emotionally sunken).

First performance, and I'm apologizing right now because the instrumental track almost overpowers the vocals for the most part (Jinho and Hui specifically have the punch to their voices to be very clear for the most part through the entire thing). But there aren't many performances of this song and if you think I'd send this post off with a badly mixed representation of their vocals, you're quite mistaken.

Now, that being said, Shinwon and Hongseok lifting their heads at the same time at 2:52 during Hui's part right there is both adorable and a little funny. They literally look they have strings attached to the back of their heads, and they were pulled at the same time. And they look at each other at the very end of the song 3:39. Are they emotional support members for each other? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were.

But Yan An and Yeo One at 1:54? Swoon. Swoon, I tell you. Swoon over those vocals. (As a side note, considering how much taller than everyone Yan An is here, this had to have been before Wooseok, Pentagon's giant maknae, hit his last growth spurt if the official heights are to be believed).

And speaking of the harmonies, I really appreciate the wide shot at 3:02 that shows that every single member other than Shinwon and Hongseok (so count that, that's eight out of the ten) are singing that harmony right there. Why have a group? So you can have harmonies.

Thank you.

Next.

There's also evidence of, I think that's Yeo One in the striped shirt, one of them closing his eyes at 2:08 and singing along when it's not his part. It's unlikely that you'll catch E'Dawn doing that for this song because he apparently is not a fan of ballads.

And just a little something I noticed because I inspect the videos, at 2:34 during Hongseok's part right there, the way he's backlit makes the little peach fuzz on the back of his neck stand out adorably. I don't know why I think it's as cute as it is. 

If this video doesn't spit you out at 3:47, well, feel free to skip to the start of When I Was In Love (but I do recommend you take a listen to the beginning of that video with Like This because the title track is gorgeous, but maybe not right now.) 

It sounds like the song started at Yuto's part with the autotune, so you're missing the first half or so of the song here.

The stage arrangement and design here for this song is genuinely very cool. They're all put up in boxes surrounding their gem symbol, which is why I included this even though you're missing half the song: the arrangement for this stage is a little bit more of a spectacle than the simple sitting or standing that the other stages have.

And I have to say that the cameraman loves Hui. Focus is not taken off him during his ad-lib at 5:16 even though he's no longer the only person singing right there. 

Thank you for the fan upload! So, this concert was from the tail end of November 2017 in Seoul and apparently the entire thing is still available to watch on Weverse, if you're part of the Pentagon community, because this was a VLive streamed concert. 

VLive was the best. I miss it and I wasn't even around for it.

Anyway, I'm inclined to believe this is live because there's zero reason why a song that they're just standing and singing for would be lip synced, and if they're anything like BTOB, they find lip syncing to be incredibly difficult. But at 1:25, it looks like you can see throat tension despite the atmospheric red stage lights. There are also some different vibrato patterns from Jinho and Hui than we've heard previously. At 2:14, again, we hear a vocal pattern that's different from how we've heard the song before (which actually kind of reminds me of every time Seventeen performs live because Hoshi specifically never sounds like the recorded version and whichever member that is feels like he's in the same bucket of vocalist as Hoshi).

The lighting for this stage is fascinating. You know that I like to look at the other members to see what they're doing when they're not singing? Well, this stage makes that a little bit difficult. They did the thing where only the members that are singing are highlighted. A lot like a color-coded lyric video, actually, so that's pretty cool, even if I'm a little disappointed. Then at the end, they're all lit up.

Did I mention how VLive was a wealth of performances we just don't get on Weverse these days?

Whatever member that is at 1:28 is looking a lot like Mingyu from Seventeen. I think that part is supposed to be Yeo One's line, but that's not the member who is singing the rest of Yeo One's part that comes immediately before that. So I'm at a bit of a loss. I don't know most of their faces well enough to be able to identify them yet. Regardless, he's looking pretty fine right there. I have a couple of suspicions about which member I think that is, but I'd need them to stand to either confirm or remove one from that list (top suspect is Yan An due to his presence during the harmony in the chorus and otherwise lack of lines, but, as previously mentioned about how tall he is, I'd need to see if he's the tall one here. Sitting, he and Jinho are almost the same height, which is wild because of the listed height difference between Yan An and Jinho if that is actually Yan An like I suspect because we only see Yeo One's half of the echo during Yan An's part. Which is kind of annoying, not going to lie). 

You know what's funny? The more I watch these performances for this song, the more I realize that the face I have in my head attached to Jinho is not actually his face, which really just means that I need to spend more time on his content to correct.

I love the detail of the embossed lightning or flame or whatever on Yuto's coat. He looks very elegant regardless, but that little detail turns him into a commander or something from a fantasy series (I'm thinking Stormlight Archive, especially since the coat is blue, but there are a number of others that would work as well, including Final Fantasy).

But. Again. Yeo One and Yan An's harmony at 1:19 is a thing of beauty. Wow. And then there's Kino and Hongseok at 1:30, which further supports my theory that the mystery hottie at 1:28 is Yan An, if the pattern is correct. If we could have gotten more wide shots for the harmonies, this would be a whole lot easier to figure out. But I'm working with logic and what I have.

And then for my Spanish speaking friends, have a color-coded lyrics video with Spanish translations instead of English. I can't verify the quality of the translation because I don't speak Spanish and while I can kind of understand it written, I have to run it through a French comparison in my head. And as anyone who speaks Romance languages can tell you, French is weird because of how the vulgar Latin was blended with the Frankish language to create French, so I don't know how accurate it is.

That's it, my Champions! I'm just testing that out to see how I feel about calling y'all that because, Dearest Reader, I can't keep referencing Bridgerton. And not only does it tie back into my love of history and historical fiction (you can try to drag A Knight's Tale out of my cold dead hands) (also I'd point out the idea of fighting on behalf of someone that we see in Game of Thrones that I'm currently itching to do a rewatch of since House of the Dragon is releasing new episodes and if you want my thoughts, I'm dying to yap about it), but there's still a Dragon Age connection because of Dragon Age 2 and Hawke, the canonical cousin to the human mage Warden from Origins. And since y'all champion your faves and their songs when you submit them to me, it's also accurate in that way. I don't know. Still chewing on the idea, but I think this is definitely the frontrunner.

Anyway, I really hope you enjoyed this song. Pentagon is one of my favorite groups to listen to that I don't know a lot about because their vocal excellence is top notch and I really wish more people would give the group a chance as a whole. Which is why I picked a ballad for their b-side. I wanted to show off their vocals. And this one is a very pretty, member-written ballad that also kind of makes you want to rip your heart out of your chest. Win-win!

If you've got a song you'd like me to dig into, please drop a comment or you can always fill out The Form for maximum anonymity. I love seeing the songs y'all give me that I can in turn shout about myself. Thanks for reading! Continue having a pleasant day! I'll see you next time!

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