And from Moses! Meanwhile, Patrick’s little Edward Snowden act here has nothing to do with the visit from the Jukebox Secret Police he’s currently receiving…

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Mo Kim: Musically and thematically, “Goodbye 20” shares much with last year’s “22” by Taylor Swift, but where “22” embodies the weightless joys of young adulthood, “Goodbye 20” embodies the burdens. It only takes one line to kill our buzz: “My 20 has gone, I have done nothing.” Swift sings about breakfast at midnight and falls in love with boys who look like bad news; Kim considers dropping out of the school she, like many Korean students, has worked a lifetime to get into and works odd jobs just to have some spending money. Yet the song resists gloom and pitches itself in an interesting place, somewhere between Kim’s down-to-earth ruminations and instrumentation lifted straight from Red — whimsical guitar strums, peppy synths, and marching band drums. The reason it works as well as it does is Kim, who humanizes the friction between the ideals and the truth of adulthood, what everybody tells her versus what it’s like to experience it herself. Her earthy, unaffected voice has never sounded as emboldened as it does here: refusing to be swallowed, navigating through the noise.
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: I don’t know if I’m revealing too much about the inner workings of The Singles Jukebox here — we have e-mail chains! — but this song was presented to us with the sentence “Because Korea needs its own Taylor Swift, too.” That acoustic guitar and Lim Kim’s voice lead me to believe this would be true, but then the chorus blew up into this big colorful pop hook and I had my doubts. Then I went into cultural-discovery mode and found out that 19 is the equivalent of 21 in America (i.e. you’re an adult! Get loaded!). So I don’t know about you but that makes 20 a lot like 22. Oh, but Lim Kim reminds me way more of the 20-somethings I knew (including me) than Swift’s breakfast-at-midnight party kids — “When your 20, you’re always the youngest adult,” and “I thought a breathtaking love would/as if a new world would open to me,” with one key word at the end — “stupid.” “Goodbye 20” isn’t an ode to that happy, free, confused time, but a kiss off to naiveté.
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Brad Shoup: An astounding amount of backstory here, and not all of it makes our narrator sympathetic. And yet, when she asks me how 20 was, it’s like we’re on my parents’ porch. This absolutely puts me in a particular space. The intro reminds me of Henna Chevrolet commercials; the chorus is all VH1 blocks of Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch. And then there’s the text, assured and blinkered in all the resonant ways, withdrawn when it’s not reaching out. And when she snaps at someone trying to fucking touch her? I trust the tingles in my collarbone.
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Will Adams: Verses from a cellular service commercial, chorus from 00s era pop-rock album track. What to do? “Don’t fucking touch me!” Nice try, but bleeps won’t make me interested.
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: An utterly pleasant and polite slice of Whatever drifting over the ears and into the aether. Dramatic highpoint — a bleeped out “don’t fucking touch me” i.e. the height of toothlessness.
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Alfred Soto: While it boasts the discovery of fresh emotions that distinguishes the best teen pop, the pieces don’t quite work: the synth is rather ugly, the percussion thick and uncertain. Stopping the track for for the aural equivalent of looking at the camera strikes me as a glib gesture too.
[4]

Iain Mew: With its gloriously bright chorus, “Goodbye 20” is a world away from “All Right” in mood and sound. The two share one smart bit of writing, though, in their repetition of irritating questions Lim Kim is being asked. It doesn’t take until “don’t f#$@|% touch me!” to get the pressure and disillusionment she’s suffering from, not just because of how expressively she sings the verses but because the needling of “how about your 20, girl?” says it all.
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