Amber – Borders
Is there a K-modern-rock chart for songs like this?
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[4.25]
Crystal Leww: I’m intrigued by how dated this sounds — does Amber want to retroactively join Fort Minor? Mike could have used a woman in his crew, honestly.
[4]
Iain Mew: Amber being the kind of person whose life was changed by a later Blink-182 album isn’t something which has come through much in f(x)’s music. It’s a surprisingly neat change to hear her making an earnest and careful nu-metal song minus the metal, and easy to read resonance into the image of crossing borders from a Taiwanese-American K-Pop star. The unforced personality, contrasting “Shake That Brass,” helps the song overcome lurking uneventfulness.
[6]
Alfred Soto: “Stand up straight and fight your way” sung in a weary monotone cuts deeper than “Fight Song.” The sirens and piano tinkle and air horns competing with tossed-off verses have an amateur hour vibe.
[6]
Cassy Gress: Goddamnit, Amber. I always feel bad criticizing “you can do it!” songs, particularly ones correlated to the performer’s own personal struggles, and Amber is one of my favorite kpop performers, but the singing parts of this are exponentially better than the rapping parts, and rapping is a good 2/3 of it. Compare the flatness and weak structure of these raps to the 8 bars of rap she got in “4 Walls.” Compare it to most of anything she’s rapped on an f(x) song; compare to “Shake that Brass.” This is dull and I wish she would have just sung the whole thing.
[4]
Jer Fairall: A pleasingly graceful production, but where the music affects melancholy, the singing and the lyrical sentiment insist upon the maudlin. As a conceit, too, framing (and depoliticizing) “borders” as “challenging personal boundaries” is as clunky as her rapping.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: Amber designed this rhyme to remind herself how she tried so hard. Then the chorus sounds like “Family Portrait” by Pink. Not saying she’s picked the wrong sources, exactly, but maybe not the right songs from those sources.
[5]
Will Adams: Drab and dated, “Borders” takes what could have been an affecting message and distills it into its safest and uninteresting conclusion.
[4]
Brad Shoup: It’s like the “I’m gonna go listen to LINKIN PARK” meme formed a band.
[1]
Reader average: [3.2] (5 votes)