Cue the food metaphors!

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[7.20]Jessica Doyle: There may be fizzy fun and new ideas somewhere in there, but to get to it I’d have to fight past the pigtailed-blond-cheerleader aesthetic overlaid with enough leering to induce self-disgust, and y’all, I already tried Lollipop Chainsaw, and that at least didn’t hit me with that La-la-la-la-la screech right out of the gate.
[3]

Mo Kim: YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
[10]

Micha Cavaseno: If y’all folks haven’t noticed, Red Velvet are fucking killing it. Elsewhere, you’ve got “Automatic” which is such subtle jazzy R&B sophistication that I’m about to break out the N’Dea Davenport debut and just call out from work & life just recalling it. But on “Ice Cream Cake” there’s a clipped precision absent from a lot of K-Pop. It’s maximalist electro-pop that’d make Skrillex’s eyebrows wag, Brill Building Girl Group cheek embedded so carefully it wouldn’t register if it weren’t for the “Cherry on top!” bit in the second verse’s beginning. Because this song, especially on that hook, it doesn’t try to seduce. At first the chorus seems a bizarre overcompensation until it leaves you in the goddamn dust. Red Velvet are laughing at you within their rocket; clad in smooth homerun shades, they cackle as you get tossed aside by the air pressure of their momentum. Sheesh.
[9]

Madeleine Lee: Some songs are beautiful cinnamon rolls, where the craftsmanship works to elevate a form to its most pure and Platonic. Then there are ice cream cake songs, songs that deliberately fuck up form and declare that to be the fun part. There’s piped frosting, but it snaps when you cut it and tastes like creamy freezer burn, and that’s why you like it. “I Got a Boy” is an ice cream cake song, and so is f(x)’s entire art-bait thing, and so is this “Ice Cream Cake,” made in the shape of a Venn diagram centre between the two. Similar to Jessica, my initial reaction to all of these songs is suspicion, even deliberate contrariness — just because it’s in two different keys for no reason doesn’t mean it’s good! But an ice cream cake isn’t only made to persuade you that it’s good; it’s meant to taste good, too. At this many listens deep, I can’t imagine this not being in two different keys, and even the “Hollaback Girl” stomps don’t annoy me. There’s a Platonic version of an ice cream cake somewhere, too.
[8]

Iain Mew: “Ice Cream Cake” is enough of a perfect blend of “I Got a Boy” multiplicity and “Airplane” gliding escapism that I figured it must be another DSign production, like “Happiness”. In fact, it’s new collective Trinity, whose previous highlight has been a song by an Australian X Factor winner. Neat! That’s not the only surprise though, the most glorious one being the not-quite-jump-cut from the second chorus into Irene’s rapping over music box twinkles, and full credit to everyone involved because I can’t get enough of that bit. That’s for both the sudden intimate beauty of it, and how well the song is structured around it. There’s a hint of the same at the very start before going off to the rocket blast chorus, and it re-emerges just when the second chorus uncoils to the point where it seems like it must collapse. The sensation is of threads that have been there all along being pulled together perfectly.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Cupcake makes a wine called Red Velvet Cake. Not bad and tastier than the dessert but boasting a sugary recoil too, much like this song.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A K-pop group using K-pop’s favorite metaphor and drizzling on what sounds to me like music-box brostep; if we’re talking ice cream it’d be salted caramel. Salted caramel is great in small quantities; food metaphors like these are great until you start thinking about them.
[6]

Brad Shoup: I try not to hold out for anything in pop — I don’t want to die like everyone else — but I gotta admit, propulsion arrives so rarely. “Ice Cream Cake” provides it in nitro boosts: a touch of the cheerleader chant, the rejoinder melody that shoves the music-box forward, the group’s steady melodic ascension in the chorus. But like a lot of semi-hype Korean pop tracks, momentum is scuttled by obligation. Show off the group, have someone do the ballad-ready vocal, put the rap in. Any one of those approaches, stretched over three minutes, could have hit real paydirt.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The use of the old kid’s chant makes a good bridge between sections, as does the “la la la.” It also repays close repeat listens on headphones; I nearly missed the countdown/blastoff, for starters and there’s a lot of buried detail. A song this busy rises and falls on whether its shape-shifting is just change for its own sake or whether each part is stuffed with hooks. “Ice Cream Cake” succeeds because its variety and aggressive shifts in mood are exhilirating rather than exhausting. It’s like a showreel of highlights in three minutes.
[9]

Will Adams: Like a scene from a future revamp of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, pumped fuller than Augustus Gloop with shiny ganache. I would usually object to production this berzerk, but I gave up desserts for Lent and my sweet tooth has been whimpering the past forty days.
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