We bump some J-music in the whip.
Hello! Welcome back to yet another installment of the J-Music Exhcange/Rate! If you know, you know 😉 BUT, if in case this is your first time here on the blog and you’re not quite sure what this post is all about ー
The Exchange/Rate is a tandem album review series conducted every month by yours truly alongside my good friend and fellow Japanese music fan Al (from Omunibasu). Each month we decide on a specific theme with which our reviews would revolve around. We then pick out albums from our respective libraries which we think best coincides with that theme. We will then give the album we chose to the other person and vice versa (exchange), after which we then listen to and subsequently review the album we were given (rate). This project has not only allowed us to explore music beyond our libraries, but it provides an opportunity for us to see our favorite albums from a different point of view. It is our hope that this series is able to do the same for you and that you either find a new artist to try out and/or we offer you a fresh take on one of *your* favorite albums 
Al picked out a very fun idea for us this time around which I’m sure you guys are really going to like. I mean, we’ve all been in that spot; you’re with your crew all crammed inside the car of your one friend that has a driver’s license, passing around the auxiliary audio cable for the car’s speaker system with everyone taking turns bumping a couple of tunes as you make your way to your usual hangout. All of a sudden, it’s your turn. What do you put on when you get passed the aux? (XD). Yes. That’s going to be the theme for this month’s pair of album reviews. This is something that I’ve mused from time to time myself, and I personally think that the decision-making that goes into figuring out which album to pick for this one isn’t as straightforward as some might think, wherein I do believe there’s more to it than just going with an album that sounds good to you.
To that end, I went and had Al go on a wild ride (lol) as I had him listen to Awich’s Queendom (check out his review here!). We, on the other hand, will be driving to the sound of MISAMO’s Masterpiece.
Let’s go on a bit of cruise shall we?
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MISAMO is a subunit of the South Korean K-Pop group TWICE. The trio is comprised of the group’s Japanese members: Mina, Sana, and Momo; with their subunit name being a portmanteau of the first syllable of their names combined. Months prior to making their official debut subunit with the release of the mini album Masterpiece, the three were already grouped together to perform the song “Bouquet” which was included in the original soundtrack for the TV Asahi Drama “Liaison: Kodomo no Kokoro Shinryosho”.
＜Ｍａｓｔｅｒｐｉｅｃｅ＞
(＊Spotify link to the full album)
CDJapan Affiliate Link(s):
Masterpiece [Regular Edition] / MISAMO
Masterpiece [w/ DVD, MINA Limited Edition] / MISAMO
Masterpiece [w/ DVD, SANA Limited Edition] / MISAMO
Masterpiece [w/ DVD, MOMO Limited Edition] / MISAMO
＜T ｒａｃｋｌｉｓｔ＞
０１・Do not touch
０２・Behind The Curtain
０３・Marshmallow
０４・Funny Valentine
０５・It’s not easy for you
０６・Rewind you
０７・Bouquet
Ａ ｌ : When I initially suggested this album for this month’s theme, I told Leap that it felt like I was cheating a little bit with my choice. For one, with K-Pop being more and more accepted in the West, it’s hard not to reach for this one and I just felt like it’s something that I’d be very comfortable sharing with a non-Japanese music fan. Plus, given that MISAMO comes from an ultra well-known Korean pop group like TWICE, it’s easy to assume for the normal folk that you’re probably just gonna hear their Japanese-born members perform some sort of ‘extension’ of the main group’s music, right? Well, as I mulled over it for a bit, I started to realize that’s not really the case and I’m very relieved that JYP didn’t go down that route when it came to the debut of this unique group.
I think it’s pretty clear that MISAMO wanted to make a name for themselves with this album, which is super apparent throughout many of the tracks on Masterpiece. “Don’t touch me” is a pretty dang good album opener and a cool song in general, as you’re instantly entranced by Mina, Sana and Momo’s sultry vocals and slick raps (plus, their appearances in the MV), as well as a chorus that’s catchy as heck. We then get to hear some more interesting styles/genres from the trio such as “It’s not easy for you” having a cool combination of rough guitar playing and trap beats; and especially in “Behind the Curtain” where it gives off a really nice jazzy and showtime-y vibe to it, thanks to the fun piano melodies and prominent brass sections. And while the more low-key/laid-back tracks like “Marshmellow” and most notably, “Bouquet”, felt a bit out-of-place when taking the whole EP into consideration, they have their own charms and are certainly still enjoyable. Overall, seeing MISAMO take on a darker and mature image with this album, as well as the group embracing their Japanese background and fanbase, was quite sweet to experience, even as a surface level fan of TWICE.
But was this also just a ruse to get Leap to talk about K-Pop and TWICE on his blog… okay, yes.
＜Ｓｏｎｇｓ ｏｆ Ｉｎｔｅｒｅｓｔ＞
０１・Do not touch
MISAMO starts us out with what is canonically (that is to say, determined by them and their team, supposedly after much deliberation) *the* title track of the EP, Do not touch. Whether or not the decision to make this song the lead off track of this release came before or after deciding on the motif of a “Masterpiece” with the many allusions and references made to real life art work in the promotional video for it is beyond me (even the album art being made to look like a Renaissance Portrait). What I find interesting about that though, and as you’ll find as you listen along to the rest of the songs here, is that it’s actually the only song that thematically ties into the concept.
Granted, albums are never that uniform anyway, but I’m choosing to point it out in this instance here specifically *because* of how much effort went into Do not touch from an overall production standpoint. MISAMO and their team had a clear idea, and the execution of it is nothing short of what you’d expect coming from one of the most successful groups in K-Pop. The sound production in particular I thought was top-notch. The track is relatively simple for an R&B track with not a lot of tricky parts to it, but the beat is otherwise clean and well-polished. I personally really liked the section before the drop with the guitar loop where you can hear this creaking effect (like someone walking on floorboards) mixed in. Kinda like an art thief sneaking into a museum or a gallery to steal which plays into the song’s theme of “art pieces not to be touched”. I thought that was neat.
０３・Marshmallow
Now, full disclosure (probably should’ve began by saying as much too), I’m not all that familiar with TWICE’s music save for maybe a song or two of theirs that I got to know through osmosis. In that regard I do ask that you take whatever I say here in this review with a grain of salt. I don’t normally make this disclaimer for the Exchange/Rate (Al has had me listen to bands and artists that I hadn’t listened to prior before already) but I do feel the need to do so here with respect to those who have been following the group for a long time. That being said, on the flipside, I do think I offer a unique perspective of someone listening to this release “blind” and without a bias so to speak.
Though I might not be as knowledgeable in the group, what I do have experience in is listening to subunits. There’s an interesting thing that happens when you go from a larger group to a much smaller one where you’re able to focus on the individual voices much more. This we can attribute to the line distribution, which increases inversely proportional the fewer people there are singing. Simply put, you get to hear members sing more than usual in a song when they might not normally as much. While I can’t speak to how Mina, Sana and Momo sound when they’re with the rest of the TWICE girls, I can at least go by how they are as MISAMO. For the most part I do think the EP does leverage the fact that the three collectively have a lower than average vocal register well enough across all its tracks. Do not touch from earlier uses them to great effect for instance, but I actually think their vocals shine a bit better in tracks like Marshmallow here with its more mellow and laid-back energy.
０５・It’s not easy for you
Suffice for it to say, singing-wise, I do believe MISAMO do their best work when they’re given a bit more breathing room in the track *specifically* to play around Momo’s vocal timbre. For better or for worse (depending on whether or not it’s to your preference) her voice is the one that stands out the most throughout all the tracks on Masterpiece. This is perhaps as a direct consequence of her being able to go even lower than Mina and Sana, who otherwise both end up occupying the same spaces due to their relatively similar ranges. More often than not, it’s also Momo who gets used to cut through a verse with an attention-grabbing double time Rap-style delivery which has since been somewhat of a staple inclusion in both K-Pop and even J-Pop as well.
While I don’t really mind it, I do honestly feel like her voice could be better utilized within the context of MISAMO, and we get a glimpse of what that could be here in It’s not easy for you. The dark and smokey Slow Rock instrumentation fits tremendously well with everyone’s velvet-y vocals, but even more so for Momo who’s right at home and blends in rather than stand out. At the very least, I think this slow of a tempo is the right speed for them to be singing at as it really brings out the sultriness of their individual voices. And because the song is on the slower side this is also where they end up doing their best harmonies with one another too (the sequence from 00:57 to 01:19 in particular I thought sounded really good). I see a lot of fans treat this as more of interstitial track because of how short it is, but I would argue it’s actually the perfect length for the kind of song that it is. If it went on even just a bit longer, without any sort of switch up or a meaningful bridge, it would’ve just become a dreary track. Keeping it short and sweet was the right decision. Easily my favorite track out of Masterpiece.
０６・Rewind you
I wanted to talk about Rewind you a bit before I go over my thoughts on Masterpiece as a whole. Speaking again to the uniformity (or lack thereof) of the EP, once you get to this track you should already realize there’s really not two songs on here that sound even remotely close to one another. A lot of that is mainly because different composers and producers worked on each song. So in reality we’re actually getting different takes on what people think MISAMO’s sound should be.
An Exchange/Rate-ism that you’ve seen Al and me occasionally throw around whenever we write album reviews is the term “grab bag”, to describe what ends up happening when an artist (usually “talents” working under an agency, such as idols and voice actors) works on an album with different composers and producers, resulting in an assortment of songs in varying styles. The benefit to having something like this typically goes both ways, with the artist getting to show their versatility, and the listener having a chance to listen to their favorite performer sing in the kind of music style that they like. While I do think that that’s what we got here with Masterpiece, I can’t help but listen to Rewind you and think otherwise. Specifically, what goes through my head every time I listen to this song is that, it’s a good idea for a track, but maybe not one for MISAMO. In particular I do question they way the chorus was handled here. Where I thought their vocals shined in It’s not easy for you, I personally don’t think it was as good of a showcase here. Might just be a preference thing on my end, but I didn’t like how they were hitting those high notes.
＜Ｗｈａｔ Ｉ ｔｈｉｎｋ ｏｆ Ｍａｓｔｅｒｐｉｅｃｅ＞
One thing that I always like presenting an inquiry towards whenever I do review on an album, especially one that’s as produced as MISAMO’s Masterpiece here is; who is this release for? The quick and easy answer is, of course, the Japanese market. I found out in passing as I was looking more into the formation of MISAMO that there had already been plans to have Sana and Momo be part of a group based out in Japan which was then scrapped unceremoniously. That was back in 2012. Relations with South Korea have since gotten better in the last decade and K-Pop has steadily made its presence known worldwide. MISAMO thus appears to be a subsequent attempt by JYP Entertainment to further strengthen its foothold within Japan specifically, putting to the forefront TWICE’s Japanese members (as opposed to just having the entire group perform songs in Japanese, which they’ve already done to great success).
In asking that question, I do wonder then how much went in to deciding on whether or not these three particular members (who just so happen to be Japanese) were a good fit to be a subunit in the first place. Of course, coming from such a cohesive group such as TWICE, one might think it reasonable that a portion of the whole would be just as well put together. However, it just can’t be that easy from a purely tonal perspective. Of course, they will have chemistry and even a kinship being the only Japanese members of the group, but… those don’t have anything to do with the music, and how they will sound together in a song. The reason I say all this is that it does seem to me that a lot of things had to go right for this venture to work, almost like a gamble. Granted, these girls are consummate professionals with an entire team of people on the production side supporting them, so this project was always going to be serviceable at best.
However, they lucked out. Rather than *just* serviceable MISAMO does actually sound really good, albeit as Masterpiece taught me, in very specific circumstances. The production was never gonna be an issue, and Mina’s, Sana’s, and Momo’s voices all play with one another well enough, but I really do think you have to know what to do with them to really be able to bring out the best out of this combination. For the most part I do think that this EP definitely has instances of that. Tracks like Marshmallow and It’s not easy for you I think were able to do it in my opinion, really highlighting and taking full advantage of the three’s singing capabilities. Curious to see the direction this subunit takes moving forward. Ideally, I would want to see a more concrete vision for them (maybe have them only perform in a specific music style) rather than having them just be a unit comprised of the group’s Japanese members.
＜Ｍｙ Ｒａｔｉｎｇ＞
３.６２５ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ ５
＆
７.２５ ｏｕｔ ｏｆ １０
I couldn’t fit this anywhere else in the review proper but I had a rather interesting experience listening to Masterpiece that I’ve never really felt on any other EP (at least that I can recall from recent memory). This is with regard to the de facto title track Do not touch. We talked earlier about how well the imagery for it was executed both in its PV as well as in the presentation of the EP. In hindsight, even the title of the EP (“masterpiece”) feels like a direct reference to the same overarching theme. I want to add that there might actually have been *too much* focus devoted to nailing that particular aesthetic for that song and *only* that song, where the tracks on the EP thereafter ended up feeling like B-sides to an A-side single. Doesn’t really add or takeaway from the overall experience, just something that I started feeling the more I listened to it
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What are your guys’ thoughts on MISAMO’s Masterpiece? Let us know down in the comments! Likewise, lemme know too, which albums would you play when you get “passed the aux”? 😛
Happy Listening!
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