BTS: Be Album Review | Pitchfork

You must at least want to root for BTS. World domination of the supergroup has been a rare constant in a year of upheaval, a burst of sheer joy through all this mud. They are there The Late Late Show with James Corden, handing each other gifts while singing into their hand microphones. Here they are on TikTok, placing a bouquet in a handwritten vase and offering it to their fans. BTS has broken so many records, at such a breakneck pace, that any effort to count them almost instantly becomes obsolete. Their new album, Be, devotes a full three-minute skit celebrating the rise of “Dynamite,” their first single entirely in English, to the top of the Billboard charts. (“Don’t you think that’s what happiness looks like?” RM asks.) By the time the album itself was released, her first song had also reached the top of the U.S. charts, the first song sung mostly in Korean forever. do it.

This level of fame did not come without its costs. As a group – and brand – that values ​​authenticity, BTS has not shied away from facing the tolls of misdirection and growing up in general. They’ve formed their pure pop machine on radical philosophical ideas – the Jungian concept of the soul, a bildungsroman by Herman Hesse – with varying degrees of success. Sure Be, the Bangtan Boys focus on life in quarantine. In a year where depth is woven into the mundane, when the rote tasks of getting through the day have taken on new intensity, BTS’s mellow and shine.

“The whole year has been stolen,” Jimin sings in Korean on the glittering “Fly to My Room”, before the group laughs at lying in bed with a bloated belly, a stack of take out containers and the constant noise of a television. Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and uniqueness that makes them compelling. On “Blue & Gray,” Suga wonders if “this hazy shadow engulfing me” is classified as anxiety or depression. “I just want to be happier,” the group shout over delicate, bleeding strings, their voices reduced to pleading groans.

The thematic center of the record is “Life Goes On,” a wavering prayer to push back 2020. Artists struggle to build a record about self-isolation – Charli XCX opted for the glitch and thrill of How i feel now, while Drake danced alone in his massive, icy house. BTS snatches minutiae from the blur of the days trapped inside: “On my pillow, on my table,” they sing, “life goes on.” In the past, BTS have used their songs as vehicles for feel-good messages (“I love, love, love myself! I know, I know, I know myself!” Wings’ “Number 4”); here they are building hope in real time. Each gradual glow of layered voices, each lush harmony streaming over the delicate backbeat, assembles an intimacy. I kept repeating the song as I went through my daily chores – I pruned my inbox, pushed a Swiffer across my floor. In the seventh or eighth play, I realized I had cried.

This complex balance of confession and consolation dissipates later in the album. RM, the band’s unofficial frontman, feared “Life Goes On” might sound “bland,” and other parts of the record tried to compensate with an aggressive outburst. The raps on “Dis-easise” mix to a soft, light and contagious hip-hop rhythm but fragile compared to the more difficult behemoths of past songs like “UGH!” The neon-infused “Stay” winds through the mid-EDM, with nervous drum kicks and a siren sound; the rhythms appear to have been taken from Steve Aoki’s hard drive in 2010.

“Stay” ends with a blossoming of reverberation that slides into the shine and beat of “Dynamite,” a song that on its own achieves smooth skills: a jumble of funk and clapping and one-liners eminently tasty. (“Cup of milk, rock and roll!”) Of course, “Dynamite” also functions as a monument to BTS’s global reach, but for the group, it’s more of a gift to fans. “We call it our own charging project,” RM said. NME about the single, “and we hope it can rejuvenate you, even if only for a moment.” That’s part of the fun of BTS – you get the feeling that they genuinely want to support you too.

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