It’s time for another album review – this time Kpopalypse is taking a look at “Wings” by international k-pop sensation BTS!
BTS are all the rage right now with the release of their tenth album “Arirang”, or so their fandom would have you believe. However, it’s no secret that the most casual and the most diehard BTS fans both have one thing in common – they pine for the early days of the group, before the group made the switch to western market focus and English-language songs that the group themselves swore they would never do. But were they really worthy of the hype back in those early days when “Wings” dropped, or was it just the HYBE (then BigHit) marketing savvy that got them over the line where other boy groups failed? Let’s take a look.
BTS – Wings
Sporting an album design as aggressively uninteresting as Super Junior’s “Magic“, “Wings” was released in 2016 to commercial success and general critical acclaim, charting in several countries outside Korea. Although not as broadly successful as later albums, it formed part of the platform upon which BTS built their later international success, in fact you could almost say that it helped “pave the way”. The album features a huge rotating cast of writers and producers, however a big chunk of the album is actually built up of solo songs of the individual members. The album came in four different versions with slightly different patterns, and was later repackaged as “You Never Walk Alone” which will also be covered in this review.
1. Boy Meets Evil (J-Hope solo)
An album intro of a sort, once it gets moving (the song starts at 0:38) the descending harmony of J-Hope’s “Boy Meets Evil” makes it feel a bit like Tricky’s “Hell Is Around The Corner” but with more yelling and general angst sprinkled in instead of the original’s hazy stoner dub vibes. Sadly, just like that song it doesn’t really go anywhere all that interesting and just treads water once the main groove is established. It works fine as a dramatic intro but once the beat kicks in and you’ve heard about ten seconds of it, you get the general idea. Eminently skippable.
2. Blood, Sweat & Tears
The pretentious conceptual religious bullshit aeshetics continue on the song’s title track, but when the video stops fucking around with Christian art-wank it becomes quickly evident that what we have here is just a tropical house song like any other. In 2016, tropical house was relatively fresh, and hadn’t yet reached the complete saturation point that peaked about one year later, and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” was actually one of the better examples of the tropical house style in k-pop generally, which would later be done to death by just about everyone else in k-pop (KARD alone would for years attempt to make an entire career out of it). However a “good example” of an incredibly corny and played-out style is still pretty mid in my book, and the song has aged especially poorly, the unfortunate cost of riding the crest of a wave of an incredibly stale trend.
3. Begin (Jungkook solo)
Starting off sounding relentlessly dull, cheesy and maudlin, “Begin” improves a great deal when it hits the faster rhythmic treatment of the first chorus. However it’s still severely crippled from then onward by the fact that the song never committs fully to double-time rhythm. The end result is a song that feels like it spends its entire length building up to something that never actually happens. Some better melody writing would have saved it regardless, but the weird crooning never really cuts above the rhythm properly to deliver anything catchy. Definitely a song designed more to swoon over than actually listen to.
4. Lie (Jimin solo)
Jimin’s solo “Lie” is at least reasonable in the verses, using looped classical samples to interesting effect. Things change completely in the chorus for seemingly no reason, with the song suddenly taking on a major-tonality psychedelic rock type of feel that takes a huge dump on the mood built up until that point and pretty much ruins the song completely. Most puzzlingly of all is that the song gets Jimin to do quite a lot of work vocally, an ill-advised choice given what he’s actually capable of, forcing him to of course mime all his live stages of this song (and others). Why they didn’t give Jimin something to sing that matched closer to his real vocal abilities so he could actually pull off the occasional real performance is anyone’s guess, I guess we all know what the “Lie” of the song title is, poor Jimin.
5. Stigma (Taehyung/V solo)
A dull, conservative song, that moves at a plodding tempo, cementing V’s brand as a boring crooner in solo mode that he’s carried to this day. There’s actually some cool Portishead-type things happening with the rhythm track here but they don’t get much airtime – everything’s buried in far too many layers of soft-jazz easy-listening instrumental slop, and multiple layers of Taehyung’s overdubbed vocals squealing at ungodly high ranges make the listening experience even worse. At least Taehyung can probably actually mostly sing this for real, but that doesn’t make the song itself any better. Definitely a song only suitable for your great-grandparents to fuck to, it has no business being this high up in the album tracklist order.
6. First Love (Suga solo)
A rap song with orchestral backing, Suga’s solo “First Love” is actually the best track on the album so far, and the first song here that feels like it somewhat lives up to the hype this group received over “Wings” back in the day. It’s similar to “Boy Meets Evil” but with the key difference being that “First Love” actually has a sense of progression in the backing track’s music that makes you feel like you’re on a musical journey instead of just walking on a treadmill going nowhere. Of course rap like this only requires being able to emotively speak in rhythm, rather than actual singing ability, so it’s a mystery to me why they didn’t take Jimin down the path of making this type of track, as this would have been actually viable for him. Anyway the soaring instrumental here is the real star of the show and works well.
7. Reflection (RM solo)
Much the same as the Suga solo, but a more flat, more depressing version with blander instrumentation and rapping that sounds like RM is about to fall asleep. It’s easy to forget that “RM” supposedly stands for “Rap Monster” but I guess even monsters have to get their baby sleep in sometime. Walking a fine line between angst and boredom, there’s nothing much else to say here, this track definitely isn’t worth cyberbullying anyone for, as BTS fans were so prone to doing back in the day (and probably still).
8. Mama (J-Hope solo)
Finally something a bit instrumentally perky, this is J-Hope’s second solo song on the album and I’m unsure why he gets two but it’s probably a good thing that he did as this is one of the better songs on the album. It’s a better track than most of the others just because it doesn’t sound like it’s drowning in its own tears and angst, and there’s some pretty nice horns in the backing track. It’s nothing exactly great, but it’s listenable and pleasant and won’t want to make you slice your own wrists or jump in front of a train, which puts it in the top tier of songs on “Wings”.
9. Awake (Jin solo)
Regular Kpopalypse.com readers will know that Jin has the best track record of quality solo songs outside of BTS by far when looking at roundups and end of year lists on this site. However his song on “Wings” is a bit of a stinker, a bland ballad that sounds just like every other bland ballad that you’ve ever heard on every other k-pop album ever created. There is simply nothing at all setting this song apart from the acres of ballad slop out there that pollutes k-pop albums, and “awake” is something you’ll be very unlikely to be after listening so put it on loop if you have insomnia I guess.
10. Lost
Four of the seven BTS members get to feature on “Lost”, but you’ll wonder why they bothered as this tune could easily have been carried by just one of them (as long as it wasn’t Jimin of course). There’s no multi-part harmony vocals or anything else here that justifies utilising multiple singers, and while that’s a cricism that could be levelled at just about all of k-pop across the board, it still doesn’t make this particular combination of members make any sense. “Lost” is a boring mid-paced R&B lighter-waving track infused with the angsty dullness that permeates most of this album so far, and it sounds like it could easily belong to any other group.
11. BTS Cypher pt. 4
An actual reasonable beat starts things off, and it improves when the vocals hit – the tone of this rap track is definitely appealingly aggressive. It’s far from the best I’ve heard out of Korea (Gwangil Jo or Black Nut they are definitely not), but BTS are for the most part far more in their comfort zone delivering this type of song than anything involving actual singing. On R&B and pop songs they sound dull or simply generic, but here they deliver squarely on the promise of their hype machine with a menacing mood that’s largely absent from k-pop idol rap tracks. Definitely a track that should not have been buried so far back on the album after all the ballad junk.
12. Am I Wrong
A weird interpolation of Keb’ Mo’s “Am I Wrong“, that somehow needed four(!) producers and eight(!!!) writers including Dynamic Duo’s Gaeko(!!!!) and Kpopalypse bias Adora(!!!!!!!!!!!), BTS’s version somehow remains reasonably faithful to the original while still boy-grouping it up with lots of sub-bass and lame rapping/warbling. In the end it’s not a bad song because it at least keeps things a bit bright and sunny, but it still feels like exactly what it is – a blues track with too many cooks in the kitchen that should have been a lot shorter and simpler. Keb’ Mo’ outsold.
13. 21st Century Girl
Another track that’s reasonably acceptable or at least listenable, buried at the ass end of the album for no reason. “21st Century Girl” like most of the better songs on the album leans heavily on BTS’s core strength which is making somewhat semi-decent rap tracks. The lyrics are all about BTS telling their fans that they’re “attractive people really I promise pinky swear as long as you stay in the BTS fandom” so it’s a bit cringe but it still sounds reasonable enough thanks to ripping off a few other rap songs from back before commercial rap started completely sucking. Overall not bad at all.
14. Two! Three! Hoping For More Good Days/Two! Three! Still Wishing For Better Days
Starts off absolutely disgustingly horribly, but this song (which I’ve given two English titles as I don’t know which one is more accurate) does something which no other song on the album does – it proves that BTS (or someone connected to them) knows how to write a decent anthemic chorus. Unfortunately by the time you get there you’ve had to listen to a truly awful intro and some very dreary rapping, so you may not care by that point, but I imagine this song is a nice singalong live and probably works well in that context.
15. Interlude: Wings
I’ll skip over this final song as it’s a waste of time to cover it, an extended version appears on the repackage which we’ll look at below.
REPACKAGE – YOU NEVER WALK ALONE
Released in early 2017, coming in two versions and once again featuring some truly scintillating art with all the appeal of staring at a blank wall of a prison cell, BTS certainly didn’t pave the way for interesting cover design with “You Never Walk Alone”. The label scrapped the final track from “Wings” and added some extra tracks, which are below.
15. Spring Day
A mid-paced track that fits pretty well with the “Wings” songs, in other words it’s competent enough but just a bit too angsty and maudlin to actually be enjoyable. The song actually uses a e-bow guitar technique that I really like, but it’s overused here and the endless layer of scratchy guitar overstays its welcome and sounds like nails on a chalkboard long before the song ends. If you love this song and don’t know what I’m talking about, then good – as soon as you hear it you can’t unhear it and it will annoy you forever. Don’t ask me about it, you have been warned.
16. Not Today
Probably the only song on either the main album or the repackage that sounds like it actually belongs on a boy group album, “Not Today” is decent. The quality is almost entirely because of the backing track choices, the vocals actually do very little and those huge synths do the vast majority of the musical heavy lifting. It’s a reasonably good track and the sort of song that I’m surprised BTS doesn’t have that many of in its catalog.
17. Outro: Wings
The extended version of the final track on the original “Wings” release. This song is also reasonably decent, it’s nothing amazing but it has the brightness that a lot of the rest of the album lacks. It certainly had no business being buried right at the end or either album and it’s confirmation that nobody at HYBE knows anything about ordering songs on an album correctly. Perhaps the plan was to put most of the rubbish at the start to scare away all the casual fans so only the diehard BTS fans knew about these tracks… but it’s far more likely that someone just didn’t know what they were doing.
18. A Supplementary Story: You Never Walk Alone
By far the worst song on either version of the album, if you think that song title is awkward, just wait until you hear the music. Pure junk from start to finish, the kind of music that people pretend to like so they can creep onto you at the club, it’s truly disgusting and you should feel disgusted when you listen to this. To BTS’s credit, while they have a lot of songs that are overly angsty, melodramatically cheesy, or just plain boring, they’re pretty consistent and don’t have much in their catalog at all which stinks as much as this does.
FINAL THOUGHTS
“Wings” is a dull listen, straight up, and while there are occasional bright spots, it’s abundantly clear that the music itself isn’t the main drawcard here, even for those who like it. The entire package is achingly maudlin, self-important and angsty for the most part, and I think that’s actually by design. If you’re an angst-ridden teenager who is depressed and hates the world and can’t read between the lines of corporate bullshit enough to reject pop culture on an ideological level and then “Wings” comes along, maybe you’d relate to it and it might make you feel better. Indeed that’s exactly what most of the album feels like it’s designed to do, and that’s probably true given that BigHit were caught slipping creepy, prying personality-profiling questions into fan surveys to fuel their future marketing back in the day. However I’d argue that you’d have a better time listening to heavy metal instead, a musical style that is actually more self-esteem affirming, plus you’d get better music, too, music that’s actually more worth listening to in its own right, divorced from image, marketing, fandoms, and cult-like behaviour. The repackaged version of “Wings” is definitely better than the initial release so if you like the songs here enough to spend money then that’s what you should definitely pick up, but if I wanted some “me against the world” music I’d kick this shallow emotional junk food to the curb completely and listen to {insert incredibly good metal band that I don’t want to name lest they cop hate from psychotic BTS fans here}.
That’s it for this post! Kpopalypse will return!
