Jewelry - Superstar

It's only hit me now that I've found over twenty K-pop songs/albums worth writing about and featured them all - that's a lot of new music and yet I'm still looking for more. This special is ending in the next two weeks or so, I'm afraid. There's so much other stuff to blog about and so many things I haven't done because of this and I originally said it would last for more or less a month.

OK so this is an older song around 2004/2005 - the album was released in 2005 and this song was the lead single from it. Jewelry were part of the girl groups one generation after Fin. K.L and Baby Vox(although Baby Vox were 2 years into their career when Jewelry showed up.) and they took about 3 years to actually become gigantic. Unlike Kara who used to be very serious then became cutesy later('ll get to them in the next few days), these girls used to have the cute/sweet image and I personally thought the songs were really bad but then in 2004 they came back with this really seriously amazing pop song and everyone fell to their feet.

They kinda wasted their hype though 'coz after the release of the 2005 album that launched them into superstardom, two members left and the other two launched solo careers - the group was put on hiatus. They came back in 2008 with two new members and a cover of this European dance song(not sure which country but I'm pretty sure it's European) and the success of that matched that of their 2005 album. So back to that album - I'm getting carried away.

I'm not surprised at all that this song was made in the same year that Rain's It's Raining was. Apart from the obvious similarities in the video, the feel of the whole song makes you want to go and listen to the Rain song. At least that's what it made me do when I first heard it!

It's very girl group-y, the song and the dancing. This is what a lot of girl groups in Korea were doing around that time while all the ones in the US and UK were either split up, splitting up or on the verge of splitting up - Atomic Kitten had their greatest hits out in 2004 and Destiny's Child followed suit the next year.

The feel of the song reminds me a lot of early Girls Aloud mixed with the 'real' guitar sound that Just A Little from Liberty X had and some song off the soundtrack of a Disney superhero/save the world-type show. The melody didn't amaze me right away but over time I began to really, really like it - it has its strong points.

4.4/5