[MV & Album Review] LOONA � 'Olivia Hye'

AKP STAFF

LOONA � OLIVIA HYE

Track List:

1. Egoist (Feat. JinSoul) (Olivia Hye)
2. Rosy (Feat. HeeJin) (Go Won, Olivia Hye)

Over the past 18 months, LOONA has released several single albums, each single introducing a new member of their band. Now the 12th and final member, Olivia Hye, has her time in the spotlight.�

"Egoist" is the title track, and features JinSoul. The tune starts out as kind of an R&B tinged song�and eventually gets more poppy. I love the echo effects in the chorus, which lend it more of a cool factor than it would ordinarily have on its own. JinSoul's rap is not half-bad, either. It may not be Epik High level, but she holds her own. Olivia Hye's vocals are not bad, even if she sounds like a lot of pop hopefuls. The song is exceedingly slick, though, and I like it a lot.

"Rosy" takes a safer path�and uses the tired tropical house beat. It's not bad overall, but I wish they'd find something else (scratch that; then something else would get overused). I like how it gets playful in the middle. Olivia does a nice job on the bridge, which was very short.

I didn't get that much of a sense what she can do. The producers tended to drown out her voice in a lot of synth effects, and not giving her a proper chance to shine. And that may well be the point. Regardless of whether Olivia herself did a decent job, sonically this collection is pretty good. The singles aren't amazing, but they're solid pop numbers. And now I can't wait for LOONA to have a proper debut.

MV REVIEW

Okay, that was dark. Seriously dark. We see Olivia here, seemingly trapped in a shadowy industrial area bound by lattice fences of steel and quite a few floors. From there, we see nods to the other MVs by the other members: the apple (common across most of them), a mechanical claw (Yves), a cherry (Choerry, natch), the theme of being lost (JinSoul), etc.

They do an epic job of conveying a sense of danger here, with the transformation into a wolf, the blood when Olivia bites the apple, the color scheme of black, white, and red, the silhouettes and darkened spaces succeed in making us think something is very wrong here. The salvation scene at the end (where she's free and comes face to face with HeeJin) was a breath of fresh air -- for her and me.

This is probably one of the better LOONA videos I've seen though. There were some that just had the sense of being cheap or awkward, and this one, for some reason, doesn't look that way. And it's nice that they had a mythology to build on from the other MVs to give this a sort of deeper narrative as well. I'm happy to say that I can definitely give this one my acclaim. She is very talented and this group has a very bright future.