Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
A couple weeks ago, the anticipated collaboration single between the band Rolling Quartz and Dreamcatcher/ChRocktical vocalist Siyeon finally dropped. Personally, I was trying not to get my hopes up too much just because of my life approach to expectations, but on paper they seemed to align perfectly.
Well, they did.
Note: The music video does have an annoying amount of strobe effects, though I’m immune to them after decades of watching T-ara music videos. Feel free to just listen to the audio version.
The two artists ended up meshing together ideally, as Rolling Quartz brought along their usual rock heaviness and aggressive energy while Siyeon’s inclusion weirdly almost seemed to cue a more melodic (or at least better) tilt than a lot of the band’s usual stuff. As such, it almost functions like an early-era facsimile of Dreamcatcher at times — about as high a praise as you’ll get from me — though with the rest of it more hard rock in nature. Jayoung and Siyeon also ended up vocally complimenting each other beautifully, which always seemed possible in theory, but you never know until you actually hear it. Meanwhile, the guitar solo as a part of the bridge was good, I hope it’s longer if they play this in live sets, as at that juncture of the track it was a great opportunity to let the band cook a bit more than they did.
What I think has been an overlooked part of the collab’s success is the involvement of Yoon Do Hyun (YB) as a producer, as that likely helps explain why everything seemed to go off without a hitch. The production was crisp and cohesive even as it played with tempo at times with a little push and pull effect, and the same goes for the mixing of soft and hard vocal sections, but those elements remarkably never seemed to kill the forward momentum of the track. And so in the end, they all indeed rolled the dice and took a chance on this collab, and fortunately landed on something like a Nat 20.
