Son Dam Bi – Type B (B)
손담비’s debut album is a little less catchy and addictive than what I kind of expected from what I heard from her beforehand. I know I had a weird addiction to 미쳤어 (also known as “Crazy”) before listening to this album, and I didn’t even know the name of the song at that time (I later realized it was because I watched After School’s debut performance, where she appeared to sing that song). In any case, this is Son Dam Bi’s debut album with 10 tracks, 2 of which are remixes and 1 is an instrumental. The music itself doesn’t really stand out in the Korean music industry much, but some of them are kind of cutely catchy, while others are just really lame. By lame, I mean really boring. Anyways, one of the things holding Son Dam Bi back a lot of the times on the album would be her vocals. Her voice is nice, but sometimes it just really lacks the omph and power that some of the upbeat tracks need. Other times, she performs quite nicely. “No Sympathy” just really lacks any vocal flavour and she lacks any phrasing and doesn’t hold her notes well at all. However, on 느리게잊기, her expression in her singing is really quite good, making it one of the ballads on the album that actually work. The remix for 미쳤어 is quite good as well and keeps the addictiveness of the original.
MEG – BEAUTIFUL (C-)
Oh MEG. Why are you so hilariously entertaining? Seriously though, girl still can’t sing. I don’t care how “unique” you think her voice is, there’s something called pitch, and she doesn’t have very much ability to keep any of that in her songs. After listening to three albums, she’s still terrible. On the bright side, there’s still an array of random songs where her singing isn’t as irritable. “TELEPHONE” is probably my favourite track from MEG out of the three Nakata albums I’ve heard. It’s absolutely addictive, and her voice isn’t quite as irritating, although there are still some moments in the song which make me want to cringe. I also particularly like “SKIN”, which is another one of those long, mostly instrumental tracks from Nakata, which has minimal MEG singing. It’s repetitive, but fun. The worst culprit on the album would be “STAR”, the obligatory jtek ballad, which does nothing but reveal even more technical problems with MEG’s singing. That, and MEG sounds like a dying kitten throughout the whole thing. I’m not quite sure why she’s allowed to sing ballads. In any case, MEG’s third Nakata album is okay. As an album, MEG’s singing is still pretty bad, but the material on the album is okay. Not much of it stood out to me, but there are still plenty of cute melodies among it all.
Lights – Lights EP (B)
Lights is a Canadian singer-songwriter that writes synthpop music and is currently widely played on Canadian radios despite not having a full album out. I first came upon this artist on the Old Navy commercials, where they played “The Last Thing on Your Mind”. Eventually, I found this EP and decided to listen to it. The first thing that stood out was Lights’ really nasally, whiny voice. This works against her in all possible ways. This isn’t saying that she’s tone deaf, because she carries a tune decently. However, her technique is probably equal to some of the mediocre Disney singers I’ve heard (I’m talking about you, Ashley Tisdale). She’s really not that good of a singer for the most part, but I’m sure with some more practice, she’ll improve, because she has some decent moments. While I really don’t like her as a vocalist, her songs are actually quite nice. “Drive Your Soul” has the least amount of nasally straining, and is quite a nice track. In fact many of these are nice tracks, but the level of singing varies from really bad to decent. “The Last Thing On Your Mind” falls into the really bad category as it’s full of nasally straining everywhere on the track. In any case, the girl is still a talented songwriter, which makes the EP still rather pleasant to listen to if you don’t mind her voice.
