South Korean songwriter, singer, and producer 박혜진 Park Hye Jin’s model may be described as “informal confrontation.” Regardless of the smoothness of her burnished deep home, she is aggressively matter-of-fact about who she is and what she stands for. Certainly one of her earliest singles was known as “I DON’T CARE,” in any case. However her self-released new album, Sail the Seven Seas, means that she’s had a tough time of late. Life on the street—years of touring mixed with strikes from Seoul to Melbourne, London, and Los Angeles—heightened her self-reliance and intensified her loneliness. Regardless of its summery vibes, Sail the Seven Seas is usually stormy going, venturing into uneven emotional waters that often go away her adrift in her emotions.
Park’s finest work has surfed between twinkling home melodies and ruthlessly intense drums. Her model is each distinctive and versatile, folding in disparate style experiments whereas at all times highlighting her signature instrument: her voice. Park’s monotone could be creative: singing, rapping, spitting, and sighing her lyrics to each dreamy and punishing impact. On a tune like “Are you able to,” the interaction between the heartbeat of her infatuation and the undertow of her contempt felt panoramic, a portrait of a lady in deep romantic battle.
To this point, although, she hasn’t fairly been in a position to maintain a tune collectively along with her voice alone. Park falls into this entice at a number of factors on Sail the Seven Seas, the place scaled-back manufacturing leaves her already shaky vocals painfully entrance and middle. The title monitor’s lyrics are emotionally bare, however the wistful piano is musically inert, failing to move her wish-in-a-bottle longing anyplace in any respect. Her voice is healthier served when it’s employed as a percussive device. She tears into her verses with gusto on “Bklyn Babe” and “Intercourse on the Seaside,” which function a few of her finest rapping to this point. However she undercuts that versatility by too typically falling again on blunt-force repetition. The annoyance and desperation implied within the hook of “Tryna Get to over You” doesn’t come via in her disaffected chant, and although “N.Y.C.” options some cool sonic detailing, her mantra-like loop (“New York Metropolis… New York Metropolis…”) falls flat.
After her earlier forays into footwork, techno, and entice, Sail the Seven Seas folds chillwave into Park’s repertoire. Synths flare and fade like sunsets on “Foreigner,” whereas a dusky guitar riff opens up Park’s leapfrogging verses on “Bklyn Babe.” These tropical accents are a automobile for some fraught feelings. Frustration is a serious theme, and all through the album, Park addresses a litany of slights and insults in humorous, plainspoken language. On “Foreigner,” she recounts the indignities of the immigration course of in a venomous deadpan: “Let me get a inexperienced card, I don’t need to marry you! I don’t want you for a inexperienced card! I’m fucking gifted!” The stupidity of the hurdles that Park has to place up with requires a pointy rebuke, and she or he delivers.
As satisfying as it may be to listen to Park gentle into impolite staff, border stooges, clueless fits, and racist assholes, one longs for the artist to seek out some sense of security and safety in order that she’s not continuously on the defensive. Her biggest work reconciles hardness and softness, energy and vulnerability. The penultimate monitor, “California,” fuses a rollicking drum break with breezy G-funk synths, making full use of her skills as a rapper, and ends with a call-and-response in Korean that she solutions for herself: “Who’s the one? I’m the one.” Whether or not this self-produced, self-released album is supposed as a profession reset or a manner of marking time between greater initiatives, Sail the Seven Seas is a reminder that Park doesn’t take instructions from anybody.
