Live review: H1-Key and The KingDom at Adelaide OzAsia Festival 2024 by Kpopalypse

1 week ago 13

H1-Key and The KingDom were in Adelaide, and Kpopalypse was there to see it! Did it meet required standards? Let’s take a look in this Kpopalypse live concert review!

As many caonimas will know, I have not had the opportunity to go to many live shows lately, which is a shame because the amount of live shows in my country has been (finally!) increasing. After many years of k-pop drought, Blackpink came here and paved the way for other k-pop groups (and in partcular girl groups), and as a result many of them have now been touring again. However I’ve had to miss out on a lot of these events. Twice and IVE had concerts in Australia recently but I couldn’t afford to go because they only tour the eastern coastal states where I don’t live, and nobody sends me to these things for free. The price of a hotel room plus flights plus tickets is a big expense that I just can’t justify right now what with the Australian housing crisis in full swing and interest rates being sky-high.

Along come H1-Key and The KingDom to the rescue! Kind caonimas pointed out to me their double-bill mini-concert as part of Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was:

A 15 minute drive from my house
Free admission

Finally, a k-pop event with the right location and price to meet my budget! I couldn’t not go and report on this event. As regular readers will know, H1-Key have an exceptionally good track record for quality songs, and often appear on Kpopalypse favourites lists. The KingDom on the other hand have appeared on certain other favourites lists of mine, and so I was keen to see how well their visuals would translate to a live show… and maybe I’d enjoy the music too, who knows?

The OzAsia festival was happening in Adelaide’s Elder Park, and here’s what it looks like when there’s no events on:

And here’s what it looked like when I arrived:

I got there about half an hour before the advertised start time of 6pm. One good thing about k-pop related events is that they tend to actually run on time, and this one was no exception, as when I arrived I could already hear the MC warming up the crowd for the appearance of H1-Key and The KingDom later that evening. So I knew I only had a short time to get some food. Fortunately there were lots of options:

The boundary of the event area was lined with dozens of portable food stalls, serving food and drinks from everywhere. I got a feed from some Malaysian food stall that mysteriously didn’t have anyone queueing up unlike everywhere else and got some tofu and rice thing which was pretty good actually. I’m not sure if it was worth the $20 asking price but oh well the concert was free so whatever. It was still way more worth it and tastier than the dogshit food I had to endure when I went to Sydney Kcon.

So then it was time to locate the stage, which I could hear but I couldn’t see. Eventually I found it hiding behind about 57 shade umbrellas:

The girls on stage in the above image are from a Melbourne dance group, I can’t remember their name, but they performed a medley routine, you can see them here in the starting positions for the dance for After School’s “Bang!” which then segued into Blackpink’s “Pink Venom” and some other stuff. They were good actually but I wasn’t really paying that much attention because I was busy deleting all the shit out of my phone in preparation for taking a bunch of photos.

Then there were a few short travelogue advert videos. Tourism companies can’t resist using k-pop as a vehicle for their “come to Seoul it’s so awesome here” nonsense. One of the advertising videos even had people asking “Can you meet idols in Seoul?” with the answer of course being “sure” (they left out the bit about what special phrase to use at the tenpro though). Anyway that didn’t last long thankfully so soon it was time for the groups. Let’s talk about them.

H1-Key

Both groups did six songs. I can’t remember the exact order for H1-Key but the songs were:

…and some other song, I can’t remember which one but I don’t think it was any of the ones they have a video for. There were no ballads, it was all rockers, and it might have just been my imagination but I think that maybe one or two songs were re-recorded in a more rock-style instrumental format so everything matched better sonically. It was also plainly evident that the girls were singing live (although of course their voices were embedded in the backing track also) and the proof was that the vocal audio even sounded a bit scratchy during the opener “Athletic Girl” while the engineers were trying their best to filter the wind noise out.

Audio quality was really good overall, if a little quiet. I was standing on one side of the stage with my ear only a few metres away from the PA stack and I didn’t even feel the need to put in hearing protection… well, not for the music anyway. The fans were almost as loud as the sound system, screaming enthusiastically whenever vocal lines changed from one member to the next, although they were about to get a whole lot louder later on when The KingDom took the stage.

Of course it wouldn’t be a k-pop concert without annoying talk breaks, and there were three of these, an introduction, a second longer one where the group were asked some generic questions, and then a final one. The questions were just the usual kind of stuff like what’s your favourite place in Seoul to visit, what’s your favourite Korean food, what do you like the most about Adelaide etc. (For the record Riina likes tteokbokki, but nobody outed themselves as a patbingsu liker.) They were also asked to show some “ending fairies” (the cringe to-camera gestures groups do at the end of TV stages) and the MC also ran a quick competition where she gave away some albums to people who knew H1-key facts.

All four girls spoke mainly in English apart from a few more complex phrases that there was a Korean translator for. They were quite good at talking to the audience, and Hwiseo came off the best here as she was doing more talking than the other girls. Hwiseo and Riina definitely had the best outfits and made the best visual impression overall for me, and I know Riina’s boxy outfit looks weird like she’s a Transformer or something in these pictures, but it looked cool onstage while she was doing the dance routines, I can’t explain it, it just kind of worked for her.

Anyway they were great. Hearing all their best songs back to back really brought home to me just how good H1-Key’s song catalog is, there wasn’t a bad song there and for the low, low price of free one slightly overpriced but still pretty decent tofu meal plus a $5 parking space, it kicked the ass of a lot of other k-pop stuff I’ve paid hundreds of dollars to go and see just for sheer song quality.

A short ten minute break later and it was straight onto…

The KingDom

Even though the concert started at 6pm with H1-Key, the MC of the evening made special mention just before the concert started that we should protect our ears because “at 7pm it’s going to get really loud” and it was clear when The KingDom hit the stage that this wasn’t her making a mistake with the times, she was simply referring to The KingDom’s start time. As soon as The KingDom came out the mainly female audience right at the front kicked the cheers into high gear and at that point they really did feel like the main event.

The songs were, in order:

…and again I’m pretty sure there was a sixth song in there somewhere but I can’t remember what it was. Once again audio quality was good, and by this time any audio quirks were well and truly sorted, so nothing sounded out of place.

The KingDom’s set followed much the same format at H1-Key’s, with the group coming out with two songs straight away, then the same talk breaks in the same places and even the same competitions and questions from the MC. The main difference is that while H1-Key’s songs were all upbeat numbers with dance routines, The KingDom had a ballad in the mix – “The Song Of Dann”, which came off really well and was a surprising set highlight. Although I like their songs overall less than H1-Key’s, their more electronic numbers sounded great over the PA and they really worked well in a live context. What they lacked for in song quality they made up for with stage energy, as their dance routines were a bit more physical and interesting than H1-Key’s, so they were at least entertaining to watch.

Another area where The KingDom did really well was in talking to the audience. They had a lot of fun doing Australian accents and doing the “Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi” chant. I can’t remember who was who (and yes there is one member missing, Hwon is on hiatus at the moment) but I think Dann and Mujin were the ones who did most of the talking. Their between-song clowning around was actually a lot of fun, and they really won the audience over by just being friendly, charming and laid-back. They also slipped in a reminder that they’re touring Austalia next month doing an 18-song concert tour, and asked the fans if they were going… but glossed over the fact that this tour isn’t coming to Adelaide. Cries of “Adelaide tour!” from the crowd were just sort of not acknowledged, which was a bit of a shame, but that’s all I could fault here.

The only other letdown with The KingDom was that they dressed like a bunch of unwashed car mechanics for some reason. No costume changes for the songs with period costume videos (in the above picture they’re performing “The Song Of Dann”) so that was a shame, they left me feeling very heterosexual. Apart from this minor letdown, they were actually great, very entertaining and even the songs of theirs I didn’t like came over pretty well. I enjoyed watching them and if you’re a fan I really would recommend checking out their concert if you get a chance, based on what I saw here I think it wouldn’t disappoint.

THE EVENT OVERALL

Just some quick pluses and minuses of the entire thing.

The best parts: it really did run like clockwork at this festival, props to OzAsia for keeping things to schedule, making the changeovers quick and not wasting time with bullshit. Sound was generally good, organisation was good, the MCs were pro, there were tons of great food options (I regret not starving myself before the show to make myself hungry enough to try more of them) and it was free entry so how can you complain really. It was a pretty well put-together event and shame on the various festivals overseas charging megabucks for this stuff while scamming people left and right with stages that don’t run on time, cancelled artists, poor organisation, shit food options that suck ass, confiscating fans’ water bottles at the entrance for “safety reasons” just to sell people overpriced similar ones inside the venue and a litany of other fuck-ups and scammy behaviours. OzAsia’s organisers proved that this shit really isn’t that difficult and you don’t have to be a cunt about things, cheers to them for putting on a great night and doing it the right way.

Room for improvement: not a lot, really. Maybe a couple more songs from each artist instead of a big-ass quiz would have been nice. Also, the MC kept asking the audience to fold down the big table umbrellas so people at the back could see the stage, but what she failed to realise was that a folded-down umbrella actually obstructs the stage view more rather than less, because a thick bunched-up umbrella blocks out more horizontal view space than a skinny pole that hoists the umbrella way above your head. Also where were the pretty hanboks for The KingDom, I didn’t get my boring heterosexuality challenged at all. I’m nitpicking though, it was still great and I’m glad I went.

Oh and enjoy this shaky-cam of H1-Key’s stage introduction:

Sorry about the wobbliness, I’m not in my phone fidelity upgrade era. Also apologies that there’s nothing like this that I recorded for The KingDom, I actually ran out of phone storage space recording this H1-Key video, but then The KingDom didn’t wear handbok or even much stage makeup so fuck it, you don’t want to see a bunch of boys in ugly baggy pants with random grease stains and neither do I. Mujin did say he liked tteokbokki though, so that’s something.

That’s all for this live review! Kpopalypse will return!

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