Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

SHINee – Sherlock

Bad times behind me?


[Video][Website]
[6.88]

Jonathan Bogart: This is how I remember the boy bands of the late 90s: big and forceful, dance-pop as mechanized masculine ritual, practically daring rock-guitar purists to claim they don’t hit hard.
[7]

Frank Kogan: Love how they mash this, the singers each trying to outrun a wobbly bass and to dodge ominous horn bursts – and then the sky opens into exquisite boyband harmonies, and a second song emerges from the murk of the first. The voices should be a bit more penetrating, but still, it’s one of the year’s exhilarating moments.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: With labels lobbing so much K-pop and boy-band material onto U.S. soil, the shipments have to mix eventually. This is the best possible outcome: Teddy Riley inspiring the moppets in their pubescence to skip Timberlake and get right to Jackson. They might have to raid Moonwalker’s soundtrack to do it, but pop’s ransacked worse.
[8]

Alfred Soto: For twenty bewildering seconds I thought it was 1990 and keyboard swoops heralded the arrival of POISON rat-tat-tat. They say sayonara to subtlety with choral synth gunk, but not before repeated cries of “I’M. SO. CURIOUS” threaten to smother the curious.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: If you take out the synth brass, you should be able to imagine this as what a boy band would have done in 1995 in response to Michael Jackson’s “Scream,” (it can’t just be the smashing noises, it can’t) and even though it’s 17 years late, that doesn’t mean it’s not very welcome. The bit around 2:45 (“bit nat da, sarajyeo”) is pure Timberlake though, and the chorus is practically Britney, only with a touch of extra weird and a boatload of surplus enthusiasm.
[7]

Anthony Easton: I like the glitchy bits–the shattered glass, the helicopter sounds, the eight bit electronic noise, all of the messy ugly edges that function like the black eye on a beautiful fighter. It is still excessive, over the top, too busy and too messy, but there are bits where the excesses work. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Did they nick the intro to “The Payback”? I doubt these guys know ka-razy, but the bass wub links their sweet and hard sides like a federal highway project. The refrain is a true Wonder throwback, the kind of thing Usher and Dre & Vidal nailed on “Caught Up”. Can you imagine prime Stevie doing new jack swing? Isn’t that an exciting thought?
[10]

Iain Mew: I like the repeated synth brass fanfares, and the way that that sound cuts sharply in and out like it was meant to be a constant backdrop but bits of it have been hacked away. The shoving together of a sequence of different ideas with obvious joins between them doesn’t work any better than it did in the last part of the first series of that other recent Sherlock, though. SHINee’s capable enthusiasm isn’t quite enough to make up for it.
[5]

8 Responses to “SHINee – Sherlock”

  1. Listening to “Payback” just illuminated this song so much for me. So thank you for that, Brad.

  2. Happy to contribute.

  3. Does anyone know the breed of terrier in the vid? I guessed Jack Russell, but I don’t know these things.

  4. I think it’s just a bull terrier.

  5. The Jack Russell is the breed of the dog on Frasier, and the dog in The Artist.

  6. Also, unrelated to terriers, and unrelated to SHINee (unless it is related), Sherlock demonstrates that Australia and Korea are very different countries, as so:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ROcg9toVw

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=murI8Hrlpck

    (but this may merely illustrate that broadcast and cable are different countries).

    (I seriously considered that those Korean trailers were fakes and that someone was taking a Saturday afternoon troll, but so far I’ve found no evidence they’re not bona fide.)

  7. It’s “ka-razor.”

  8. My apologies to his estate.