Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
After being delayed for a day due to quality reasons or something, SM Entertainment finally allowed Red Velvet to drop their comeback track, “One Of These Nights“.
If you told me “One Of These Nights” was just a part of the collection of sleepy ballads that is ‘SM Station‘ and not Red Velvet’s much-anticipated comeback, it wouldn’t take much convincing.
It’s not just that it’s a slow song, it’s that the track is essentially static for the first two minutes until the backing track picks up, and even then there’s no real payoff to the promise of that build either. When it initially picks up it’s like being at the State Fair as a kid and your parents promise they’ll get that chocolate bar you’ve been craving if you don’t act up, but at the end of the day they instead hand you organic pig placenta on a stick: there was a lot of anticipation and excitement involved, but in the end just a lot of disgust and disappointment.
Some are talking about the emotion of the track, but I’m assuming they’re hearing things for the sake of Red Velvet, because I would’ve bought into it more if it wasn’t paint-by-the-numbers vocally with little deviation from what was scripted. It was like the robotic updated oompa loompa characters from “Dumb Dumb” sung a ballad or something, and that’s unfortunate because there was actually a story behind this to help sell it.
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The music video helps to save what could be a waste of a comeback, and the story could’ve helped save the song if they did make it an emotional affair instead of a sterile one. That’s because the directors utilized the story of Chilseok (the Korean title is “July 7th“) and explored that concept in an impressive and, at times, abstract way.
“One Of These Nights” was also beautifully shot using diverse sets, and there’s even camera techniques that are rarely utilized in standard K-pop music videos that are added to provide an impressive sense of depth to the spectacle.
So despite this being a ballad, I do believe it had the potential to be an impressive one. The almost flawless execution of the music video makes this comeback compelling almost by itself, but I can’t get over the sterile feel of the vocals and that the instrumentation of the song is so utterly boring.
