SHINee - A.MI.GO

It's on this week's top 20, it's all I've been talking about on Twitter for the past few days (even recommended it to Paul!) and I'm clearly obsessed with the song so it's time I write something nice about it.

The thing about this band that still to this day baffles me is how they can dance together doing the exact same things and still SING THAT EFFIN' DAMN WELL. Then there's the fact that they get all the good songs - I'm not kidding!

A.MI.GO was sort of like how Genie was to me at the start - an OK song. When I first heard this it was just after I had heard Replay - it must've been too much brilliance to handle. I don't know why I listened to it again though but I did and for crap's sake it's one of the most brilliant songs ever thought about.

Over-all the song's very heavily padded, processed and backing-tracked but the strange thing about it is that when they do this live and even in the recorded version, it sounds natural. The original recording doesn't have auto-tune throughout except for maybe five seconds towards the end but that's hardly noticed.

Whoever produced this song is a genius - no doubt.

The verses are saturated but the vocals still manage to stand out above everything else - they're amazing, if I may say so. Everyone has a solo but now I know why these guys were put together. As a group the vocals are very good, I'd love to hear some serious a capella work from them but individually they complement each other - the level of vocals is even throughout the song.

There's four guys in this group that can sing their lungs off (the fifth is a rapper.) - the leader has a beautiful deep-ish timbre added to a really, really smooth voice and there's one guy with a strangely brilliant quality to his voice (to those who know their names, I'm talking about Jonghyun). It's got a deep timbre but when he hits the high notes, something else happens - no matter how hard I try, I can't properly describe what his voice sounds like. There's another guy (Key) who reminds me a lot of someone from NLT - he's the one that makes SHINee sound like NLT to my ears. Lastly, the youngest (Taemin) has one of the smoothest, cleanest voices in pop right below Shane Westlife.

The song basically revolves around the vocals - I'd imagine if anyone else sang this song it wouldn't sound this good. Who said all songs like this had to be auto-tuned?! If they have the voices, why bastardize them? Doesn't make sense, really.

5/5

The live performance that did it for me: