Album Review – T-ara “Absolute First Album”

What, Kpopalypse is reviewing albums now? Yes, it’s true! Read on to find out more, and to read Kpopalypse’s review of T-ara’s “Absolute First Album”!

Did you know that the last time Kpopalypse reviewed a k-pop album was eleven years ago? There’s a reason why I generally haven’t reviewed albums, and that’s because… well, k-pop albums pretty much all lick balls. I said it a decade ago and I’m still saying it now, there are really no “good” k-pop albums. This is to do with the way k-pop albums are created, and I’ve spoken about that at length before, and we’ll no doubt talk about that a lot more here too just to bore you all some more. However it’s occurred to me that after over a decade of resistance, reviewing albums might be a useful thing for me to do, for the following reasons:

• Kpopalypse album reviews will (hopefully) help illustrate not just how, but why there are no good k-pop albums, so people don’t have to keep asking me about it, although they probably will anyway
• Mind you there are some albums that are vaguely semi-tolerable and they should probably be covered, and by contrasting them with very shit albums maybe we can learn something
• People who have come to this site for music recommendation reasons instead of tits and ass and rock hard abs might find deep dives into albums useful, even if the other 95% of readers won’t
• It’s still more interesting to me than writing about some bullshit k-pop scandal nobody with a life cares about or whatever
• Just because

Some other trufax:

• I’m just going to focus on the music included, I won’t worry about the physical product, given that most people buy/listen online and also I don’t want reviewing albums to be a huge money sink, plus I have enough physical k-pop albums clogging up my house and I don’t want to add to it. I’ll include album unboxing videos when I can and you can decide for yourself if the physical package is worth pursuing.
• As I don’t see myself making these posts very often, I will try to deliver maximum bang for your buck and only cover albums with larger song counts. I’ll try to avoid covering mini-albums, or something “album length” which is just one song and ten remixes of one song, unless I have a really good reason to. The k-pop world tends to call literally any release an “album”, because they’re thinking about it in the sense of a “photo album”, which is pretty accurate when you think about how people consume albums these days but I’m a cunt so I don’t care.
• If there’s a scammy “repackage” or any other related bullshit I think is relevant I’ll include that stuff too at the end of the review.

Let’s do it.

T-ARA – ABSOLUTE FIRST ALBUM

T-ara’s debut album, with fourteen songs, released in 2009. I’ve often called this album “the best album in k-pop” so it’s a natural place for Kpopalypse to start reviewing albums. But… how good is it really? Also, my opinions on songs do change over time, so how has it held up?

1. One & One

A banger of an album opener co-written by the late Shinsadong Tiger, “One & One” is the perfect song to open a T-ara concert… and weirdly was never used for this purpose, in fact there is no record of T-ara having performed this song live ever. That’s a fate that this song shares with many T-ara non-feature album tracks, like most Korean idol groups they were certainly never big on performing their deep cuts, and with good reason because a lot of them were pure shit, but in this case they really should have considered it. “One & One” is short, punchy and has a progressive song structure with hardly any repetition, it’s where I learned that it’s common practice for k-pop albums to really start off with a bang and then it’s all basically downhill from there.

2. Like The First Time (Cheoeum Cheoreom)

When T-ara’s debut was about to be released, their agency polled their audience and asked them which song should be the first single. Their audience responded with “Like The First Time”, so the label… didn’t listen and released “Bo Peep Bo Peep” anyway, in a foreshadowing of communication issues to come. At least “Like The First Time” got a music video, one that many T-ara fans themselves don’t seem to be aware even exists, a cute drama with the group helping out an unconvincingly nerdified Hyomin (of all people! Who the fuck did they think they were fooling…) to make the best first impression on a date or something. The music is essentially a k-poppified reimagining of La Roux’s “Tigerlily” right down to the horny lyrics (written by none other than HYBE CEO Bang Sihyuk because of course) and weird silly rap part although in T-ara’s song they change the rhythm completely for some reason, and then grind back up to the original tempo later with all the beat-skipping grace of a second-hand chainsaw rope-start. Deliriously stupid and beautiful like all the best k-pop, it’s one of the greatest things T-ara ever did.

3. Bo Peep Bo Peep

T-ara’s big single came with several videos full of the notoriously unwatchable retina-destroying fast editing that their videos would become known for but I’m including here a fan-upscaled cut of the “sexy” version which is maybe about 2% more watchable than the original. It’s all very PG-rated of course so don’t get too excited (and your eyes won’t have time to focus on anything going on anyway), but the dark tones used here are certainly visually preferable to the gaudy dance version and the even more unwatchable Japanese version that came later. It’s all the same song anyway, a maddeningly repetitive but super catchy dance track penned again by Shinsadong Tiger and driven by one of the best electronic synth bass lines in k-pop. Putting the bassline at the forefront is something that k-pop girl groups have only recently learned how to start doing again after pretty much forgetting about bass for almost the whole of the 2010s, but T-ara definitely paved the way on that front.

4. Tic Tic Toc

Another actually pretty good album-only song that T-ara never bothered to trot out for a live show even though they damn well should have. It’s a neat pop song with a big synth-orchestrated sound and the kind of semi-trot melody-writing flair that infused a lot of T-ara’s early tracks. I think a lot of their earlier songs were crafted by people more comfortable with trot who were suddenly under pressure to update their sound a little, and I think it really shows here with the self-consciously heavy beat and bubbling synths that never really let up the pace. I suspect this song might have been originally commissioned as a feature but the label decided to go for songs that were more modern for the big spotlight.

5. Bye Bye

The first mixed bag of the album, “Bye Bye” has a really quite annoying harmony chrous hook and then makes the huge mistake of leading with it a capella. The song does get somewhat better from there and it’s far from awful overall, but there’s nothing all that outstanding going on here either and this isn’t one of the better T-ara tracks. Weirdly, T-ara actually did perform this one live, sometimes trotting it out as a last song of the evening just because they say “bye bye” a lot in the lyrics, I suppose it works okay in that context but it’s not much of a song apart from that. I mean, why not leave the stage on a mid song if you’re not planning on doing encores, it makes sense I suppose.

6. Apple is A

Apparently a commercial film for an apple company… what the fuck, I didn’t even know apples had companies, what kind of hypercapitalist hellhole do we live in when a fruit growing on a tree has a marketing department hiring pop groups to shrink themselves for bucks (or whatever the hell is going on here). You can watch the full original video here but honestly I prefer this upscaled fan edit, if we’re going to fuck the entire planet and murder ourselves in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses AI war it might as well be to more accurately render Jiyeon’s polka-dotted red shoes. The song is probably the smoothest of all the early T-ara semi-trot excursions, a little bit pacier and more musically interesting than all the others, and a sound that k-pop outside of T-ara’s specific agency has rarely come back to since.

7. Falling You

The first total shitshow on an otherwise great album up until this point, “Falling U” is generic Autotuned R&B ballad trash that could come from literally anybody. Just total fucking dogshit and an instant skip whenever it comes on, but hey five bangers and one at least listenable song before our first turd is a pretty good run for any k-pop album anywhere. This song was also the first garbagae ballad non-feature track I ever heard from a k-pop artist, and I thought it was odd at the time but little did I know that this pattern would be repeated on literally every other k-pop album ever, often multipe times per album. I didn’t know how good I had it when I pressed ‘skip’ that first time.

8. You You You

“You You You” follows the structure and melodic contour of most of T-ara’s early trot-influenced material, and it’s a really good example of the kind of song that “Apple is A” is similar to but much better than. Not to say that this song is bad, but T-ara have done this kind of thing better quite a few times, as did other groups on their label at the time like Seeya, Five Dolls etc because I think the producers were all going to the same songwriting school. The slower pace and leaden beat drags everything down a bit but at least gives the girls a chance to throw in some light-speed raps about heartbreak or something, which feel realistic because whenever I’ve had to break it off with women they do tend to start talking at about that speed. It’s not bad and certainly on the upper end of album tracks in general but it’s in no T-ara fan’s top five songs list.

9. Lies (dance version)

T-ara’s debut single, which was released before the album itself, its late placing on the album’s tracklist shows how little confidence the agency had in the thing compared to “Bo Peep” etc. It’s not a bad song but once again it’s relatively conservative and essentially sounds like a ballad with a dance beat slapped over the top of it to try and sell it to the kids. Given that the “slow version” of the same song is also on this album, that may possibly even be what happened. Confused yet? Well (stay with me here) “Lies (dance version)” also comes in a “part 1” and “part 2”, with the “part 1” being the version that made it to the album and the one that we’re looking at here, and “part 2” (from the separate single release of “Lies”) replacing the bland R&B styled intro with an equally bland synth and drum machine intro but otherwise being completely identical. T-ara fans will be familar with the different “versions” of T-ara songs that have nothing but the first eight or so bars changed, and this seems to be where that practice kicked off.

10. T.T.L. (Time To Love) ft. Supernova

Another song that sounds like “Apple is A”, but slightly slower, and with more rapping. These tracks don’t make the album bad because at least the listening experience is pretty consistent, it’s actually one of the things that makes the album work cohestively overall. However if you had to pick a song like this to listen to, you’d probably pick “Apple is A” unless you really liked k-pop boy rap for some reason.

11. Lies (slow version)

Did someone say “slightly slower with more rapping” because that’s basically what’s happening here, again. Don’t die of shock but I actually prefer this song in the slow version rather than the dance incarnation, just because the dragging pace of it makes it sound a little bit less like “Apple is A”, and I’ve got nothing against “Apple is A”, in fact I really quite like it, but I didn’t need it on the album four times.

12. T.T.L. (Listen 2) ft. Supernova

Okay so it’s just “Time To Love” again but they’ve done the boy rap a bit differently this time, and it’s a bit faster, and there’s a few other changes but it doesn’t amount to much really. It’s alright but it’s really little more than a slight remix rather than a new track in its own right, it’s definitely just here because it could be.

13. Good Person

We’re really at the butt end of the album now, “Good Person” is your typical strings-laden k-pop power ballad, but when you strip it down to its harmony and structural elements it’s… basically just “Apple is A” yet again (holy fuck, learn some new chord progressions guys) with a whole lot of orchestra salad dressing. But hey I bet you didn’t even know this song had a video and now you do, so I guess this post has been good for something.

14. Wanna Play?

So the story goes, “Wanna Play?” was supposed to come out with a full video, but someone leaked it to Korean TV ahead of time. The agency then got the shits and refused to release the thing at all for some reason (although a teaser which gives you a look at what the final thing might’ve looked like survives) so that’s why we don’t have it. Just as fucking well because this song is actually yelpy dogshit, one of T-ara’s worst ever songs, although I wouldn’t have minded looking at the video just to see what they did with it. Apparenly this was the song that was supposed to introduce T-ara to the world, hence the cheesy “we got that new flava sound” lyrics, but it’s probably just as well that most people have erased this thing from their memory.

BREAKING HEART – REPACKAGE TRACKS

Some time later, T-ara’s agency did that scam thing that a lot of k-pop agencies do where they rerelease the same album again with extra tracks to get the fans to buy the whole thing again at full album price instead of giving the fans just the extra songs on their own, cheaper. The new tracks were stupidly tacked onto the start of the album, when the company obviously should have left “One & One” as the album opener it was designed to be and put the new stuff somewhere after that, but getting k-pop agencies to think about albums as actual albums that have some kind of flow from song to song that’s supposed to make a lick of sense seems impossible. Hey at least you got a new photobook with even more awkward looking fashion (not sure how they managed that, but they did). Anyway, the new songs were:

1. I Go Crazy Because Of You

A pretty obvious k-poppified soundalike of Britney “trust your president” Spears’ “If You Seek Amy“, T-ara’s version is better, with more interesting melodies, a much more interesting backing track, and – incredibly for T-ara – less cringey lyrics. Having said that it’s still sitting somewhere around the lower-middle of T-ara feature track quality just because once the initial shock and awe of the sound wears off the song doesn’t really do much that’s all that melodically interesting with its one-note chants. The punchy sound still makes a great album opener (but NOT AS GOOD AN OPENER AS “ONE & ONE” AHEM) and they did definitely get the look right in the video even if as usual for T-ara music videos it’s impossible to actually focus on anything because every cut is about three frames long.

2. I’m Really Hurt

“I’m Really Hurt” ended up being the second track on the repackage, also squeezed before “One & One” in a literal crime of song order negligence, but between it and “IGCBOY” it’s the far better song of the two and one of T-ara’s best. The harmonic choice in the track arrangement is what makes it work, and if I ever get to discussing pedal point and suspensions in my music theory series I’ll definitely put this song in that post as an example of how to do it right. It also doesn’t hurt that the song has a consistent fast tempo and cool ostinato octave bass, and furthermore it doesn’t hurt that T-ara look quite good in suits. It’s unfortunate that fan upscales are doing the work that the company themselves should be doing but I guess T-ara fans have always had to work ten times as hard as anybody else to hard-carry their faves out of the media-unsavvy wilderness.

FINAL THOUGHTS

T-ara’s “Absolute First Album” isn’t a coherent album in the sense that it has any sort of concept or focus that you’d expect from an album generally speaking. It’s really more a collection of most of the stuff that was rush released in the very early stages of T-ara’s career, the big features, and a few other songs that are there to make up the numbers that feel like planned features that the label decided not to go with. Only “One & One” feels like a song that was specifically written for this album’s existence. It still works fine as a package because the sound throughout is mostly fairly consistent, even if if that’s just by accident rather than anyone actually thinking about it. Does it really matter though, in the days of Spotify shuffle and YouTube dominance, probably not, but hey this is an album review so we have to pretend that we give a fuck about albums at least to some extent, don’t we. It’s a mostly good-to-great collection of songs, recorded and produced pretty well for the time, and that honestly in the quality desert of k-pop album land is about as good as it gets, more or less.

That’s it for this post! Please let me know what k-pop albums past or present you’d like to see reviewed next, no guarantee I’ll review anything in particular of course but I’m always interested in your thoughts! Kpopalypse will return!