One last review for this week before I head off for the long weekend (Happy Easter to those who celebrate!). For this review, I have decided to bounce back in time to last week to review GHOST9’s X-Ray, which dropped last Thursday. It is the title track off the group’s sixth mini-album, Arcade: V and is also the group’s first comeback since the release of Control in November of last year.
When I consider the verses of X-Ray, the song is pretty much your standard dance track. Nothing more, nothing less. I wished the instrumental hit harder, as the song’s intention of being powerful and heavy just doesn’t hit the mark for me. While there are some productions that excel at this style, there is a large majority of releases that tend to fall into the ‘typical’ pile of this style and doesn’t 100% deliver. And X-Ray‘s verses falls into the latter pile. However, X-Ray has its chorus to thank for disrupting this typicalness, inserting a refreshing element and taking it in a different direction. The chorus features Junhyung (standout member alert!) delivering his line at a higher tone, which offsets the intended heaviness of the song. The melody was also quite memorable. Had the instrumental been a bit more innovative (it is fine as it is, just it lacks some sort of punch that potentially could have taken the song to the next level), X-Ray‘s main centrepiece would have been aesthetic as heck. But it is still a standout moment in this song. I like how the song’s main hook’s melody was repeated in a chanty form at the end, which finishes off X-Ray in a neat yet revamped manner, but also keeping it close to its foundations. Elsewhere, the vocal work and rapping were fine. Though, I felt they could have gone harder to infuse and give off more energy, intensity and power. This would have been a big help to X-Ray.
Most of the music video also felt typical. The settings chosen by the producers for the video had that (i.e. the abandoned room, the hallways, the outside of the building scenes) were staged to look edgy, but I necessarily didn’t get that vibe from those scenes. However, the grayscale scenes and some of the editing of the music video (i.e. transitions) looked really cool and had a level of visual aesthetic that was memorable. I particuarly enjoyed the grayscale closeup that focused on hair colour instead. That was the most promising aspect of this video.
I liked the performance’s ‘snap & release’ moves that featured heavily in the chorus. It looked good, and definitely showcased the song in much stronger light. But other that, it was a good performance, but with little else standing out.
Song – 7.5/10
Music Video – 7/10
Performance – 8/10
Overall Rating – 7.5/10
KPOPREVIEWED 