FIESTAR - "We Don't Stop"

FIESTAR are yet another one of those groups who I only bothered checking out because one of the DB5K members had something to do with them (in their case, Junsu), but I was genuinely interested in "VISTA", and I really wanted to see what else they had to offer. It's a good thing I didn't have to wait long to find out though, because they're back for a follow-up single!

There's so much going on during "We Don't Stop", that I had to stop what I was doing and figure out what was happening on the song. Is it a bad thing? Well, for the most part, yes. Judging by how this song turned out, it's easy to assume that the composer is kind of a scatter-brain, but looking at it closer, this song does have a lot of good ideas and extremely strong elements. But writing a song is similar to how I write a review -- the way I do it now is either I tackle one, big, issue and try to relate it to the actual elements, or I discuss several, related issues spread out. But if you've been with me for quite some time now, you know it hasn't always been like that.

In art, it's very, very tempting to take all your good ideas and just throw them all into one work -- especially if good ideas don't come often for you, as was the case with me back then. My writing was all over the place -- when I read through my older works, there were clearly some good ideas buried somewhere there, but they were overshadowed by all the other ideas running around at the same time.

To make this simpler, for example if this review for "We Don't Stop" was done by me of the past, I would've started by talking about what I'm talking about now, but then somewhere between now and the run-down of the elements, I put in a few paragraphs about girl groups going cute, or moving towards it. Sure, they're both about "We Don't Stop", and they're both important issues in K-Pop, but as far as frameworks go, this review can only have one or the other. Kind of like the song itself.

I love the individual elements -- the verses, though strange at first, grew on me, the rap bridges are spunky to begin with, and laced with those gorgeous drums really drive the point home, the melodic bridge the follows is a brave kind of epic, and the chorus/hook is catchy with a graceful bite. And don't get me started on the middle 8, which sounds like it came right out of a Swedish pop song, complete with breakdown before the chorus explosion. And you all know how much I love my Swedish pop. The composer and the arranger clearly knew what they were doing in terms of each element, because they took a sound and they executed it with accuracy and brevity, which FIESTAR took and did justice, thankfully. And honestly for those reasons alone, I really, really like the song.

But at the end of the day, "We Don't Stop" isn't five or six different elements, it's one, whole, song. Because of that, it's not enough that the elements are gorgeous on their own -- they have to be gorgeous together as well. Sure, when you put them in succession they're still gorgeous on their own and in theory they make for a gorgeous song, but when you look at it as an entire package and not verses, choruses and bridges, it's like they don't mesh together. Neither do they completely contradict each other that they end up working well together.

In the spirit of the likes of DBSK's "Rising Sun", I get that they're trying to push limits and break barriers, but you can't effectively push something as big as that with one hand pushing and the other wandering off somewhere else -- you need both hands to work together. Or in this case, all elements have to push towards one place, together. They can sound different, they can push in different ways, but they need to push in the same direction. And that's what the elements of "We Don't Stop" fail to do, no matter how gorgeous they may be.

3/5