It’s day three. One week until I have an adequate amount of money in my bank account again. Thanks to a surprisingly expensive doctor’s appointment for that (I’m fine, I just don’t health insurance cover for a lot of stuff, or any understanding of healthcare in general as I’m from the UK #NHS). But anyway, we have group three of this little project to get stuck into, and today it’s the turn of Oh My Girl.
Who are Oh My Girl?
Aside from the group that nabbed the K-poppiest name ever to K-pop? Oh My Girl are a seven member girl group formed under yet another company I’ve never heard of, WM Entertainment. I get the feeling that, digging in deeper into the less famous K-pop artists, I will be discovering a lot more companies I don’t know about.
Sadly, Oh My Girl originally debuted with eight members in 2015, but, due to health concerns over anorexia, member JinE departed the group in 2017. As well as this, when I first typed the group’s name into YouTube to see what would come up, pretty high on the list was a video of a fan explaining instances where the group had performed some unfortunate cultural appropriation. Not the best of starts, though honestly, we all know that cultural awareness is a problem endemic to this industry, and unfortunately not the preserve of this one group. They are also known for having very ‘cutesy’ concepts in their music, which is…not my thing. It’s not the best foot to begin on, but let’s try actually listening to the music…
The First Song
OK, in 2015 I’m getting the sense that Korea had run out of the multi-coloured hair dye that K-pop is so known for. Much like GFriend, the hair in Oh My Girl’s first single, Cupid, is a pretty uniform chocolate brown, with very similar styles and mostly identical outfits. This was clearly a thing. The song, however, is fun, classically bubble-gum, bouncy and relentlessly smiley. I was slightly surprised by the rapping in this song: this is a very different element to what GFriend put out in the same year. The rapping actually feels quite polished and strong, something you certainly don’t often see in cute K-pop concepts. This sub-genre tends to give us rap verses that I would call, for want of a kinder word, incredibly lame. Kudos to OMG for giving more here.
Five of the Big Hits
This was a little harder to select for this group. Oh My Girl have released a lot of Japanese music, which, for the purposes of streamlining these reviews slightly, I am trying to avoid. Ultimately, I picked Secret Garden, Nonstop, Bungee, Dolphin and Closer. The first of these was dangerously close to ballad territory, set at a much slower and dreamier pace that I have never enjoyed. The other four songs sat varyingly better with me. Bungee and Nonstop are, similar to Cupid, pretty straightforward cheerful bops, destined to be played at family-friendly beach resorts, if we’re like, ever allowed in those again. Again, shout out to rapper Mimi here, as both of these songs’ raps are better than they really needed to be. Also, I have to flag up the member reading a book entitled ‘Friend Zone’ in the video. Savage, we stan.
Then we have Closer and Dolphin. Both of these songs surprised me, taking on bolder sounds and styles and really showcasing great singing talent. Closer is an almost Eurovision-esque synthy slow burner, with a backing track that would be at home in any Europop anthem worth its salt. It was the bridge that really won me over though, with beautiful harmonies taking over from the instrumentation. These harmonies return at the song’s close, and it’s just the kind of singing tone I love to here. Dolphin is a completely different departure from the boppy normality of OMG, this time favouring a minimalist, funky core melody and overall simplistic sound. The video is also a sweet change, showing some of the behind the scenes moments of the girls working on other videos. In an industry that seems to put little stock in its idols enjoying themselves, it’s always nice to see idols having fun when working.
The Latest Song
Oh My Girl’s most recent release is October 2020’s Etoile, which has, both ambitiously and confusingly, been apparently released in four languages. It looks, from what I can make out on their Wikipedia, like the group’s first Japanese single release, though it all gets a bit confusing when releasing the same song in different languages with different instrumentations. The song left me cold, another slower, more emotive piece that just did nothing to interest me.
The Latest Album
Now this was even more confusing. Spotify doesn’t seem to want to list Oh My Girl’s work completely chronologically, and there is also a lot of Japanese work that this group does that I, as mentioned, didn’t really want to look into. From Wikipedia, I figured out that their latest release was April 2020’s Nonstop EP. This isn’t available on Spotify for some reason- probably something to do with it not being a Korean platform and me being too lazy to check out the Melon app (Korea’s streaming equivalent)*. So back to YouTube I went. This EP contains the title track Nonstop and Dolphin as openers, and afterwards moves into pretty generic fair that I can’t honestly say was super memorable. Neon has a nice, strong, eighties-influenced electro backing track, but the ballad Flower Tea just didn’t go anywhere interesting, and neither did the album’s closer, Krystal.
Thoughts?
Oh My Girl seemed more hit and miss than this week’s first two groups, Weki Meki and GFriend. I was nervous that the group’s sound would be too cutesy for me, which I am happy to say is not the case, and the songs I enjoyed most were the ones that actively pushed away from this the most. Closer particularly struck me, and Dolphin is a solid pop song, one whose melody I actually recognised when I heard it. I think it must have been one of the songs that receives hard rotation in the stores of Hongdae and Gangnam, and rightly so. The group have beautifully complimentary voices that Closer really brought out, and again, props to Mimi for bringing good quality rap in a group that so easily could have not have had it.
However, I can’t lie and say that all of the songs I tried out excited me, though it was the slower fare that put me off rather than any aigyo moment. I am willing to admit that this might be due to me not understanding the lyrical nuance in these quieter moments, but alas, it ain’t my cup of tea. I do want to do more digging here though: if the group can make songs that can be fun and refreshing, then I want to hear those songs. They do have the talent to make that search worth it.
*The EP actually is on Spotify. I just didn't scroll correctly. Smooth.
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