So confusing sometimes to be girling…

[Video]
[6.15]

Mark Sinker: You wonder sometimes when time is going to get called on K-pop’s vast factory of choreographed prettiness: when the sugar-spun cornices, colonnades, spandrels and turrets on the Hansel-and-Gretel house finally fall away to reveal the same-old-same-old beneath, the ancient shrivelled industry rooted as ever in who gets to devour whom. With an anagram as a cryptic band-name and hyper-choreographed blankness as a attitude branding (of course they dimple up and giggle sometimes, but you could never call it unscripted), Le SSerafim often make fun gestures at refusal — “I wish for what’s forbidden!” in a 2023 song called “Eve, Psyche and the Bluebeard’s Wife.” But as Solomon taught us, the rivers all flow into the sea, yet the sea can always swallow more. You want to refuse too! You want to follow the logic: to imagine the cyborg psychosis unleashed by the machine, the robo-gogo pleasure dancers advancing in your direction, Westworld-android style, insanely beautiful cyberpunk sex-cuties Terminator-trained and complete with in-brain targeting overlay, with crosshairs and scheming calibration figures up the side, until no one even grasps any longer who ordered what. “All the girls are girling girling all the girly girls” (first of all in a Southern accent, as “gals”, and afterwards in posh English diction). You want to read clues into the teen-goth Kraftwerk-style threat that’s kept out of the translated lines: “renew the neuron system / I broke out of the prison in my head.” Revolution of the Relentless Mannequins, as they break the glass and swarm through the city. And yes, I love this amping up of the menace; I love the promise that all can be overturned and changed in a moment; in our programming is your doom — to me this is a heartening fiction. So good at what they do! What if they did… something else? Who gets to devour whom? Who gets to dethrone whom? But it’s just pop, and its tremors are painted on air.
[10]

Kayla Beardslee: [A whiteboard with “Le Sserafim voguing????” written on it and nothing else.]
[4]

Jessica Doyle: With Blackpink seemingly done as a group, it makes sense to try and take the trendy-dancing-model-dols slot while it’s open. I just wish HYBE hadn’t thrown out their previous approach to song selection when they made the pivot. Songs like “Antifragile” and “Eve, Psyche, and the Bluebeard’s Wife” had verve and fun to go with the required pose-striking; “Crazy” consists solely of poses. (And this isn’t about their vocal performances; a good deal of the charm of “Antifragile” lay in Eunchae’s not having to sing “걸어봐 위엄 like a lion 눈빛엔 거대한 desire “.) We don’t even get “Where the heck is Saki? / She’s waiting down in the lobby.”
[4]

Andrew Karpan: A sort of loose fabric of a song, more a dreamscape of crossfaded bounce symbology than a statement about anything in particular (non-derogatory)    
[8]

Alfred Soto: The synths wander in from early ’10s grime, the beats are in place, the vocals are adequate, but it doesn’t stick.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A [10] in terms of grist for the fancam mill (“girls are girling” alone!) but unremarkable in all other regards — tips my scales for a shockingly well-executed reference to Galileo’s trial.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: The girls are girling, the funk is funking, the pace is racing. Learned from “Meet Me at the Loveparade” the power of slightly sinister synth riffs and from Lil Jon the power of dropping in a “WHAT?”.
[8]

Dave Moore: Love the house music 5th synths against the dah-dah-dah hook, but the whole thing is a bit stagnant. They should stick to what they do best — arty alt rock.  
[5]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: The sublime and the ridiculous would coexist here peacefully, were it not for a meme being beaten to death to punctuate every eight count or thereabouts. Still, it makes more sense than most of the 4th/5th(?) generation non-sequitur clamorousness, though that is faint praise indeed. 
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: That the song’s signature line has the reedy, metallic tone of a computer status update is appropriate, given the dependable K-pop release schedule of a new project every six months. The girls are all girling now, and they require additional supply depots. It hardly matters that the “craziest” deviation from the house-pop formula is found in the rising-pitch imitation of a mechanical overload, a fearlessly campy sci-fi take on the buildup/drop sequence. Such literalizations are welcome in a single with perhaps the most overused title in pop music; if you’re gonna grab the low-hanging fruit, you might as well squeeze it for all it’s worth.
[7]

Jel Bugle: The beats are good, a robotic voice informs us that “all the girls are girling,” and this is a good thing! But Le Sserafim are not good as my fave K-pop Trinity – (G)I-DLE; Itzy and Asepa – and this song lacks a certain sense of dynamism and excitement. It is cold and robotic and not that crazy.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I mean, it’s not a great sign when the best parts of the song are the ones where the vocals feel like they’re samples dropped into an EDM track and the verses kind of drag. But still, fun!
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Having a nuanced take or going “da.” Going “da.”
[5]